Providing new evidence on the life and times of this Scottish painter, Andrew McPherson shows Gillies to be a modernist thinker. Including paintings never seen before, he reappraises his creative output, including the relationship of portraiture to still life, placing him firmly within not only a Scottish context but a British and European one too. Andrew McPherson has been researching the life, times and works of William Gillies for over twenty years. He has rethought the formative influence of his art of two World Wars, gender inequalities and the modernist crisis of meaning and belief.

Prizes

Long-listed for The Walpole Society: Berger Prize 2024 (UK)

A deeply researched book that presents a radically fresh perspective on Gillies. -- Beth Williamson * The Art Newspaper *
Brilliant…reveals a radical and unfamiliar Gillies who has been hiding in plain sight … Andrew McPherson’s reassessment is wholly convincing. -- Duncan Macmillan * Scotsman *
The received wisdom around Sir William Gillies as retiring and semi-reclusive, quietly absorbed in the business of creating genteel landscapes is forcefully challenged...dismantles the common perception of Gillies as a countryman painter, proposing instead that his work was deeply influenced by existential concerns and modernist ideas. -- Giles Sutherland * The Times *
Andrew McPherson…demonstrates, for the first time, the depth and importance of [Gillies’] engagement with modernism. -- Susan Mansfield * Scottish Art News *
A new William Gillies, man and artist, is revealed at the turn of every page. * Alice Strang, Curator and Art Historian *
Published to celebrate both the 125th anniversary of his birth and the 50th of his death, this is a revelatory account of the life and art of the Scottish painter William George Gillies (1898-1973). Until now he has been considered a ruralist, a Neo-romantic and a traditionalist. This detailed biography dispels the myth of such interpretation and instead places his art in the modernist canon. Andrew McPherson analyses the tight relationship between Gillies’s art and his personal experience from the trauma of family history to the ‘theatre’ of war. He reveals how Gillies’s grief at the early death of his artist sister Emma became formalised and central to his art. A thorough and skilful analysis of selected art works identifies many signifiers of remembrance across time. This is a compelling book which reconsiders a modest and sensitive artist and so illuminates the nature of Scottish art in the central decades of the twentieth century. * Elizabeth Cumming, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh *
Andrew McPherson’s innovative research introduces us, with great empathy, to a new understanding of the life and work of the artist William Gillies. His approach reveals a hidden and complex family background, which nonetheless supported Gillies as he came to the fore of a largely unrecognised European modernism in Scotland, one that motivated the young Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Margaret Mellis and William Gear. Gillies’ work developed at a time when the general public were little exposed or disposed to modernism. McPherson’s generously illustrated book vividly describes the tensions of the social and creative climate Gillies worked within. -- Kenneth Dingwall, Artist and Professor Emeritus, Cleveland Institute of Art, USA

Andrew McPherson is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He has been researching the life, times and works of William Gillies for over twenty years. He is the author of (with Raab) Governing Education, Edinburgh University Press, 1988, and William Gillies: Modernism and Nation in British Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).