The World of Interiors

Top: Waiting for the Sultan 1891 watercolour on paper. Above: Dancers at the Moulin Rouge 1889 watercolour on paper

Arthur Melville SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY The Mound Edinburgh

Where would Arthur Melville have been without Amanda M.?

Whoever this siren was that stole his heart on the veranda of

Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo in 1881  she turned him down and be-

came the making of him. The young Scottish painter was in Egypt

in search of romance but got both less and more than he had ex-

pected. Rejected and tearful he fled Cairo made his way via Aden

to Karachi and northern India to Muscat in Oman up the Persian

Gulf to Baghdad joined an Arab caravan across the desert to the

Black Sea and boarded a steamer to Constantinople. En route he

was chased by bandits shot at and imprisoned

for alleged spying in Kurdistan. Painting as he

went he also assembled a significant body of

work and fashioned a legend as a swaggering

Victorian adventurer the outdoor type whose

world was his oyster a ‘glorious Empire boy’.

It was partly true but also an illusion. His

background was humbler than most entitled

Boy’s Own heroes his talents more subtle

his experience more genuinely cosmopoli-

tan. Even if we accept that Orientalism was

not just imperialist exploitation and allowed

for real interest and empathy he was no stand-

ard practitioner eschewing stereotypical har-

ems and odalisques for street scenes markets

and encounters with authority figures pashas

and sultans. Always difficult to pin down he

could bring the rustic naturalism he had seen

while studying in Paris to bear on the East even

transposing Millet’s iconic image of the sower

to an Egyptian oasis; yet he could also achieve

effects that were as apparently abstract as they were actually pre-

cise founded on brilliant colour and perfectly judged marks with

the brush. His style needed heat and sun and he made many trips

to Spain. It was there he died of typhus aged only 49  having added

the shores of the Mediterranean to his vivid repertory.

The exhibition in Edinburgh makes a considered argument

for his relatively neglected oil paintings but few will deny that

watercolour was his real element dropped on paper already

saturated with white gouache then worked wet-on-wet blotted

and spotted with dots of jewel-like intensity

• sometimes tested on sheets of glass laid over
  the painted surface. Colours were blended
  superfluous details sponged out. He was a
  master of movement whether depicting a
  slow-moving crowd a bullfight or a single
  dancer at a Parisian café-concert her twirling
  skirts catching a blaze of gaslight.
  In his work colour is often a subject in itself
  in the empty foregrounds of his Eastern scenes
  bleached white in the sun or the blues – pale
  sapphire to deepest indigo – of the Tangier sky
  a Spanish harbour or Venetian night. Melville’s
  impact on and place within the 1 880s Scottish
  Colour ists has been contentious but he is with-
  out question a unique exponent of his medi-
  um. ARTHUR MELVILLE: ADVENTURES IN COLOUR runs
  until 17 Jan Mon-Wed Fri-Sun 1 0-5 Thurs
  1 0-7 $ DAVID BLAYNEY BROWN is co-curator of
  ‘Artist and Empire’ at Tate Britain London SW1
  25 Nov-10 April

EXHIBITION diary

TOP: NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND DR JOHN KIRKHOPE BEQUEST

1920

. PHOTO: ANTONIO REEVE. BOTTOM: NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND

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