Scottish Paintings & Sculpture (450) Thu, 10th Dec 2015, Edinburgh Lot 61 Estimate: £2000 - £3000 + Fees § SIR WILLIAM MACTAGGART P.P.R.S.A., R.A., F.R.S.E., R.S.W. (SCOTTISH 1903-1981) AUTUMN SUNSET Signed, oil on board 18cm x 25.5cm (7in x10in) Exhibited: Aitken Dott & Son, Sir William MacTaggart, Christmas Exhibition 1966, no.52 Note: Sir William MacTaggart is an artist of whom Edinburgh has long and rightly been proud. He was a central figure of the Edinburgh Group, a loose collective of critically and commercially successful artists which included his peers Anne Redpath, Sir William Gillies, William Crozier and Adam Bruce Thompson. Beyond this, MacTaggart also held many key roles within the city's artistic institutions. Born in Loanhead, Midlothian, he went on to study at the Edinburgh College of Art, later taking up a teaching post there, as well as serving as president of the Society of Scottish Artists between 1933-36, and ultimately as president of the Royal Scottish Academy in the years 1959-64. A towering figure in the Scottish art scene, his contribution was also recognised out with Scotland from early on in his career; he was a member of and exhibiter in the Royal Academy, and was knighted in 1962. MacTaggart came from artist stock, successfully proving his own merit and emerging from the long shadow cast by his grandfather, the popular and influential "Scottish Impressionist" William McTaggart. Aside from a looseness and airy freedom of brushwork, their work has little in common, though they both looked towards artistic developments in France when formulating the basis of their own personal style. MacTaggart had, as a young man in 1927, exhibited alongside Colourists S.J. Peploe and F.C.B. Cadell as a contributor to the Society of Eight exhibitions, staged in defiance of the pervading traditionalism of the Academy exhibitions at the time. Keen acolytes of Cezanne, it was not long before he and his friend William Crozier were following in the footsteps of their fellow Scotsmen and heading to France on painting trips. Though Fauvist tendencies undoubtedly pervade MacTaggart's work, it would perhaps be more accurate to describe his mature style as Expressionist. In 1937 he had married Fanny Aavatsmark, a Norwegian, and the relationship led to him spending increasing amounts of time in her homeland, where Cezanne's influence receded somewhat under MacTaggart's exposure to artists like Edvard Munch. Colour became increasingly important to him, and his compositions took on a dreamlike, unstructured quality. Whether a seascape or a still life, MacTaggart's style is both highly distinctive and strangely timeless, his technique placing him in a certain artistic tradition and his unusual, jewel-like palette appealing equally strongly to a contemporary audience..