Kirkcudbright Artists' Colony

The combination of professional experience and career success, coupled with youthful energy, ambition and enthusiasm, led to the establishment of the Kirkcudbrightshire Fine Arts Association in 1886, with John Faed as its President,[3] and younger artists such as Hornel, Thomas Bromley Blacklock (1863-1903) and William Stewart MacGeorge (1861-1931) on the Committee, together with several older, local amateur painters.

In contrast to the Galloway visitors, the locally-born artists, Blacklock and MacGeorge, found it necessary to pursue their subsequent careers from bases nearer Edinburgh, although they made regular return visits to Kirkcudbright.

A style later described as that of the ‘Kirkcudbright School’ began to emerge in the late 1880s, where subjects typically involve children amongst woodland or flowers, becoming ever more decorative, and with much use of the impasto technique, with paint laid on heavily with a palette knife.

From 1915, the ‘Glasgow-Style’ book illustrator Jessie M King (1875-1949) and her husband, the artist and designer E A Taylor (1874-1951), were permanently resident in Kirkcudbright, from where they arranged annual summer painting courses on Arran.

At the same time Glasgow-based artists and craft workers visited and stayed with the Taylors in Greengate Close or elsewhere in the town, including Helen S Johnstone (1888-1931) originally from Troon, and the metalworker Agnes Harvey (1874-1947) and jeweller Mary Thew (1876-1953).

In 1931, Dorothy L. Sayers based her crime novel Five Red Herrings in the artists’ communities of Kirkcudbright and Gatehouse-of-Fleet, which she knew from personal experience through her friendship with the daughters of William Robson.