John Bellany

John Bellany was an influential Scottish painter. Credited with pioneering a style of painting that melded the influences of Impressionism with Naive painting, Bellany’s work explored endemically Scottish symbolism and histories. “What he was doing in the mid-1960s in many ways changed the course of Scottish painting,” Keith Hartley, the senior curator of the Scottish National Gallery, has said of Bellany’s importance. “It was like a manifesto: I don’t want to do paintings for Edinburgh drawing rooms, I want to do something which moves people, about ordinary people’s lives. It was very much a protest.”

Almost entirely figural, his paintings regularly feature themes of Christianity, maritime painting, and the female figure, drawing inspiration from the work of Scottish primitive painters such as Alan Davie and Robin Philipson. Born in Port Seton on June 18, 1942, Bellany went on to study at the Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1960s. His artistic career is lauded as among the most important 20th-century painters to come out of the British Isles, and his work is included among major collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Britain in London. He died on August 28, 2013 in Saffron Walden, England at the age of 71 after a long illness.