The new Naturalists

FOR all that the romanticised image of Scotland continues to entrance, in the late 19th century it was challenged by a loose affiliation of artist-friends who, railing against the Victorian diet of darkly varnished history paintings and brooding Highland landscapes, sought out the gentler terrain and steady light of southern Scotland and other climes and blazed a trail with their en plein air scenes of ordinary rural life.

Inspired by the French Realists, the Glasgow Boys, as they called themselves—most were brought up or trained in Glasgow—admired Courbet and Millet, but their hero was Naturalist master Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–84), who documented French peasant life with dispassionate honesty.

After serving in the