A Hind's Daughter
Sir James Guthrie (1859 to 1930) · 1883
A girl of about ten stands in a cabbage field, a knife in one hand and a cut cabbage in the other, and looks straight at you. She wears a plain dark dress and an apron; her hair is cropped short; her face is serious and a little wary. Behind her the field runs back to a hedge, a cottage roof and a grey winter sky. A hind, in Scots, is a married farm labourer, and this is his daughter doing a job that was simply part of her life. There is no story, no sentiment and no prettiness, which is exactly what made the picture so radical in 1883.
Guthrie was the leading figure among the Glasgow Boys, the young painters who rejected the polished anecdotes of the Edinburgh establishment and took their easels outdoors. He painted this at Cockburnspath on the Berwickshire coast, where the group spent several summers. The technique comes straight from the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage: square, flat brushstrokes, a high horizon, muted greens and greys, and a figure planted in the middle of the ground, with the cabbage leaves painted with the same care as her face.
The picture came to the National Gallery of Scotland in 1936 and is now one of the anchors of the Scottish galleries, where it stands for the moment when Scottish painting joined the European avant-garde. Guthrie himself later moved to fashionable portraiture and became President of the Royal Scottish Academy, but this early canvas, made when he was twenty four and self taught, is the one everybody remembers. Stand back and it reads as a bold pattern of greens; come close and the girl's gaze is unforgettable.
Did You Know? Guthrie never went to art school; he had trained as a lawyer before deciding to paint.
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