Details

Object type

painting

Title

Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties

Artist/Maker

Alasdair Gray artist

Place Associated

Scotland, Glasgow (place made)

Date

1964

Materials

oil (and mixed media) on board

Dimensions

unframed: 1215 mm x 2442 mm x 52 mm

Description

Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties by Alasdair Gray is a large oil painting showing a sliding viewpoint in a built-up area with Port Dundas to the north and St. Aloysius Church to the south. It depicts nightfall as shown by the dark clouds above the buildings and streets which are separating to reveal a waxing crescent moon. The lights in the streets are on and people are shown in the streetscape walking, playing or under a lamppost as the lights are coming on in people’s tenement buildings.

Alasdair Gray was born in Riddrie in the east of Glasgow in 1934 and attended The Glasgow School of Art in the mid-1950s. From this time onwards Gray was a prolific poet, playwright, novelist, painter and printmaker. His work was and continues to be celebrated in books, exhibitions and the annual Gray Day (25 February). He is renowned for his use of Glasgow for inspiration, while moulding it into a place of his imagination, in both his writing and artwork. Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties (1964) is one of the artist’s best-known works with Gray noting it as ‘my best big oil painting’. The painting was used for the front cover of Gray’s Lanark. A Life in 4 Books 1st Harvest Edition (1996) and it is a significant example of his painting within the decade following his graduation from The Glasgow School of Art.

In Alasdair Gray – A Life in Pictures, Gray wrote:

“This was painted seven years after leaving Glasgow School of Art, but derives from many sketches I made when a student of mural painting there. The single most exciting work of art I knew was the canal across central Scotland from the Clyde to the Forth, with a branch that passed near my Riddrie home on the way to the Lanarkshire coalfields…The canal excited me as the ruins of ancient Rome excited Piranesi, but I could not put the six miles I wanted to commemorate in a single picture. This oil painting shows a fragment of what I intended.

All but a few distant buildings are demolished now. They existed in 1964, and I have accurately shown how they were related, though the street up to the canal on the right and downhill on the left was one straight slope. When looking from one side to the other you are seeing round 180 degrees from Pinkston Power Station in the north to the tower of St Aloysius Church in the south. This bent perspective means that the distant gas lantern on the right and near one on the left are different views of the same. The picture also has a time shift, the foreground faces belong to the couple whose figures are far downhill to the left. I tried to show several phases of life from childhood to old age. The three young men were copied from a newspaper photograph of them leaving a Glasgow law court, and their clothing style indicates the 1950s, as does the street lighting. Ten years later Victorian gas lanterns no longer survived beside electric lamp posts. For a long time I most appreciated local colours in the gloaming when light was in the sky and streets were lit artificially.”

The scale, the composition, the city references and the artist’s physical hand in the work (his fingerprints can be seen in some areas of the canvas) all make this a highly significant work for Glasgow Museums and the city. Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties captures an area of Glasgow where the landscape and community would alter radically in the post-war Comprehensive Development Area programme. It conveys the look, rhythm and feel of daily life in Cowcaddens as well as a sense of change and is a powerful way of engaging with Glasgow’s past where the buildings, streets and people give place its character.

Credit Line/Donor

Purchased with a grant from the National Fund for Acquisitions, 2023

ID Number

3795

Location

Kelvingrove Looking at Art