Portrait of a Gallery - The Scottish Gallery

David McClure RSA, RSW (1926-1998)
Paola with Flowers c.1963 oil on board 76 x 63 cms
In 1957 McClure was the first of younger second-wave Edinburgh School painters to be offered a solo
exhibition at The Scottish Gallery showing recent watercolours and gouaches painted as an Andrew Grant
Fellow in Florence and Sicily. These works reveal the influences the artist had absorbed from his teachers
particularly Gillies and Henderson Blyth at ECA and from Anne Redpath with whom he had painted in Fife.
He was recruited that year by his subsequent life-long friend and colleague, Alberto Morrocco (in 1957
he also had his first solo show with the gallery) to join the staff of Dundee College of Art and McClure
is credited with bringing a feeling for the painterly qualities and regard for strong, vibrant colour of the
Edinburgh School to Dundee.
Much of McClure’s work is infused with the celebratory spirit of the French Post-Impressionists –
Chagall, Gauguin, Matisse and Braque. In this painting, which is a charming portrait of the artist’s daughter
Paola, contains echoes of another major inspiration, Odilon Redon, partly gleaned through the work of
a further teacher at Edinburgh, John Maxwell, about whom McClure wrote a sensitive and perceptive
monograph for Edinburgh University Press.
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