Arthur Melville: Adventures in Colour

Colourful exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland looking at the life and work of Arthur Melville.

This was a chronologically arranged show with lovely pictures from throughout Melville’s career. The early section looked at his two years in Paris and his influences. I loved his picture from the Royal Academy “A Cabbage Garden”, a study in the colour in cabbages in a rather Millet like picture.

From there it looked at his travels in the Middle East. It explained his reputation as an adventurer came from this time when he was attached by bandits. He did wonderful open air watercolours into this period which he developed into scenes into narrative pictures. I preferred the freer early versions as sometime the stories in the finished versions seemed a bit kitsch. He had a really good eye for composing and cropping an image.

There was a nice section on his work in the Orkneys including a lovely picture of a dark Orkney cathedral pulled together by the white splash of a woman’s apron in the middle distance.

In the last section they looked at his travels in Spain and Tangiers when he starts to see abstract patterns in landscape and I loved an almost Cubist like city scene with a crowd made of blobs of colour.

All in all an informative overview of a painter I had come across but did not know a lot about.

Closes 17 January 2016.

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