Bessie MacNicol was a brilliantly talented artist but, as a woman, she had to go to Paris to paint nudes. Now, after a sensational acquisition, this leading light of the Glasgow Girls is finally getting her day in the sun
About 15 years ago, I was being shown around Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery by an eminent art historian. When we got to the section on the Glasgow Boys – James Guthrie, John Lavery et al, late 19th-century pioneers of the school of naturalistic, plein air painting – I asked a question: where were the Glasgow Girls? The historian practically laughed in my face: didn’t I realise that the Glasgow Boys was an art movement? And they were all men: there were no women.
Today, no one doubts the existence of the Glasgow Girls. A few days ago, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh took possession of one of the loveliest works of the women who worked alongside the men at the Glasgow School of Art in the final years of the 19th century.
