DAVID FORRESTER WILSON, RSA (BRITISH 1873-1950)
DAVID FORRESTER WILSON, RSA (BRITISH 1873-1950)
Vanity
Signed and dated D Forrester Wilson/1918 lower right; indistinctly signed and dated lower left; inscribed Forrester Wilson School of Art, 167 Renfrew St, Glasgow, and preliminary oil study on the reverse.
Oil on canvas
115 x 130cm (43 1/4 x 51 1/4in)
Provenance
Private collection, acquired in the 1920s thence by descent to the present owner
David Forrester Wilson studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1892-93 and again from 1899, when he worked under the influential Belgian Symbolist painter Jean Delville (1867-1953). His senior by just 6 years, Delville taught at the School from 1899-1906. Appointed to the staff in 1903 as studio assistant under Delville’s tenure, Wilson went on to become Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting, and then from 1932-1938 Head of Department.
As well as the influence of Delville, who retained a life-long fascination with the Occult and expounded the importance of the aesthetic of the ideal, the work of Wilson's direct contemporaries also proved formative. His peers included ‘The Four’: James Herbert McNair, Frances and Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh who were instrumental in creating the now distinctive Glasgow Style. Other artists who shaped Wilson’s style included the so-called Glasgow Boys of a generation earlier led by James Guthrie (1859-1930) and John Lavery (1856-1941), and who via the naturalist landscapes of Jules Bastien-Lepage and the exoticism of James McNeil Whistler’s Japonism sowed the seeds of Modernism in and around the city.
View it on
Sale price
Estimate
Time, Location
Auction House
DAVID FORRESTER WILSON, RSA (BRITISH 1873-1950)
Vanity
Signed and dated D Forrester Wilson/1918 lower right; indistinctly signed and dated lower left; inscribed Forrester Wilson School of Art, 167 Renfrew St, Glasgow, and preliminary oil study on the reverse.
Oil on canvas
115 x 130cm (43 1/4 x 51 1/4in)
Provenance
Private collection, acquired in the 1920s thence by descent to the present owner
David Forrester Wilson studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1892-93 and again from 1899, when he worked under the influential Belgian Symbolist painter Jean Delville (1867-1953). His senior by just 6 years, Delville taught at the School from 1899-1906. Appointed to the staff in 1903 as studio assistant under Delville’s tenure, Wilson went on to become Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting, and then from 1932-1938 Head of Department.
As well as the influence of Delville, who retained a life-long fascination with the Occult and expounded the importance of the aesthetic of the ideal, the work of Wilson's direct contemporaries also proved formative. His peers included ‘The Four’: James Herbert McNair, Frances and Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh who were instrumental in creating the now distinctive Glasgow Style. Other artists who shaped Wilson’s style included the so-called Glasgow Boys of a generation earlier led by James Guthrie (1859-1930) and John Lavery (1856-1941), and who via the naturalist landscapes of Jules Bastien-Lepage and the exoticism of James McNeil Whistler’s Japonism sowed the seeds of Modernism in and around the city.