EDINBURGH.- The renowned Fleming Collection of Scottish art deemed to be the finest outside public institutions is staging exhibitions this August at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh and the Maclaurin Art Gallery at Rozelle House in Ayr as part of its celebration of fifty years of collecting.

Refugee Crisis Highlighted
The theme of refugees, past and present, takes centre stage in Radicals, Pioneers and Rebels at the Fine Art Society, Edinburgh, 15th August -­‐‑ September 3rd. The show focuses on artists who have challenged the artistic, social and political consensus showing two of the most iconic paintings in the collection, Thomas Faed’s The Last of the Clan and John Watson Nicol’s Lochaber No More, which in their day exposed the human and economic cost of the Highland Clearances. Bringing the issue up-­‐‑to-­‐‑date are documentary photographs of the Calais Jungle by Iranian, Iman Tajek, who himself had spent time in Calais’s refugee camp before gaining asylum in the UK and a place at Glasgow School of Art.

Other artists featured include cutting edge Glasgow Boys, Arthur Melville, Joseph Crawhall, James Guthrie and E A Walton; twentieth century rebels, Robert Colquhoun and John Bellany; and a group of pioneering women from early twentieth century painters, Mabel Pryde and Dorothy Johnstone to their inspired successors John Eardley, Margaret Mellis and Alison Watt. This exhibition is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival.

Fleming Collection’s Colourists return to Scotland
A rare opportunity to see the Collection’s outstanding holding of Scottish Colourists is taking place at the Maclaurin Gallery at Rozelle House, Ayr (18th August-­‐‑30th September 2018). The exhibition Rhythm of Light: Scottish Colourists from the Fleming Collection is normally touring museums and galleries south of the Border where it has drawn record crowds. However, as part of the Fleming Collection’s 50th Anniversary celebrations, the Colourists are making a homecoming.

The Colourist paintings by S.J.Peploe, J.D. Fergusson, Leslie Hunter, and F.C.B. Cadell, have been at the heart of the Fleming Collection since its inception. One of the first purchases in 1968 was Hunter’s masterpiece Peonies in a Chinese Vase, which along with other key works such as Peploe’s Luxembourg Gardens, Fergusson’s Blue Nude and Cadell’s The Feathered Hat, reveal the quartet’s remarkable trajectory as artists. The exhibition charts their careers from the early experimentalism under the sway of Whistler and Manet to the breakthrough impact of the Fauves – the ‘wild beasts’ of contemporary French art -­‐‑ to the mature works of the 1920s which saw a prodigious stream of Colourist painting fusing a Scots sensibility with a Continental palette. The exhibition at the Maclaurin Gallery can only reinforce the Colourists’ status as four of the most talented, innovative and distinctive artists in twentieth century British art.