Imagining Scottishness: Art, Nationhood and Identity William Crosbie’s Landscape, Cessnock in Summer
By Chloe Annan
William Crosbie’s 1944 landscape, Cessnock in Summer, allegorises the emergence of a Scottish national identity during a time of colonial expansion and growing global connectivity in the mid-twentieth century.
William Crosbie, Cessnock in Summer, 1944, watercolour, 47.6 x 66 cm, T.R Annan & Sons, Glasgow.
In the centre-front of the image, a voluptuous harbour wall curves towards and encroaches upon the picture plane, grasping the viewer’s attention. The sweeping curves of the wall and its pure white tone visually rhyme with the ships in the mid-ground before dispersing viewer focus laterally to the decks, infrastructure and homes neighbouring the port. The echoing of whites, blues and creams across the landscape creates a visual schema that directs the eye through the deceptively common yet symbolically rich Scottish town, affording dual glimpses of a simple coastal life in Scotland and a site of nation-building.
Division is a central visual feature of Crosbie’s painting. The wall’s materiality entails division– in this image it marks the break in foreground and background, land and sea. Schematically, the areas are further distinguished by colour – the saturated, yellow light flooding the town dwindles into the white which highlights the flanks of the ships. However, Crosbie disrupts this notion of division and perhaps Scottish marginalisation by extension. The gaping gates invite the shadowed figures into the port’s domain as they commute to work. Here, the sea offers a deeper symbolic meaning, connecting the town as an entity with European trade and the global market. As a member of the Merchant Navy during the Second World War, Crosbie would likely have been aware of the seas’ potential for widening access to the global stage. Furthermore, broadened social and economic horizons (from access to commercial and naval opportunities) indicate growing Scottish autonomy from the British Empire. Thus, thematised division and its breach replicate the growth of Scottish power within the twentieth century whilst the constructed nature of a simple town engages with deeper political dialogues.
Exemplarily, Crosbie imagines a Scottish nationhood or “horizontal comradeship” with external powers through his depiction of the body. Colours from the landscape bleed into the depiction of the figures which symbolically ties their personal identity with their working landscape – work which also financially enables their engagement with, and participation within, society. In this, Crosbie creates symbolic instability – the figures have a visual tether to their working lives and operate as a metaphor for a growing Scottish nationhood forged by international exchange in the 1940s. The translucent application of paint obscures the identity of the figures, affirming the impression of a dialogue occurring between the Scottish and the world. Crosbie also implicates the viewer in this transaction as we embody a worker’s journey to the port (like the faceless figures), walking along the white wall to the port.
Crosbie also engenders Scottish artistic identity through the intersection and subversion of contemporary art styles. The volumetric portrayal of the buildings around the port upholds cubist ideals of form contradicting the physical flatness of the canvas, presenting the viewer with a sense of immediacy as they are implicated in the scene. This obvious visual feature also nods to international exchange– the repeating feature of cubic units echos of the brutal treatment form and space in Fernand Léger’s 1937 oil-on-canvas painting Le Transport des Forces.
Fernand Léger, Le transport des forces, 1937, oil-on-canvas, 50.9 x 100 cm, FNAC, Paris.
The intention of Cubist conventions, however, is where Crosbie and Léger diverge. The Scottish artist does not damn modern invention, like Léger, through the mechanical and crude depiction of infrastructure but uses the flattened pictorial space to enhance an impression of their importance to industry in Scotland’s national (and artistic) production. The muted palette and medium further defy Cubist conventions, superadding a visionary tone to the image. The curved arch of the port wall bisecting the image also affirms its claim to Surrealist immateriality. Given Crosbie’s later collaboration with Surrealist artist John Armstrong in 1946 in the Deby Reid & Lefèvre Gallery, the image could also be a window into Crosbie’s own dream of Scottish nationhood.
Thus, instead of presenting the viewer with an unmediated coastal scene, Crosbie manipulates form and artistic tradition to imagine a hopeful, Scottish utopia. Nationhood is created and replicated through artistic dialogues with other countries in parallel with Scotland’s the broadening access to international trade which distinguished their national identity from that of the British Empire. As such, the productive figures and burgeoning port denote growing international recognition of Scotland as a leader in industry and implies social and economic growth – all of which shape artistic, national, and individual identities.
Bibliography:
National Galleries Scotland. “William Crosbie.” In Artists A-Z. 2019. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/william-crosbie.
Herald. “William Crosbie.” In Obituaries. 1999. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12009679.William_Crosbie/
The Royal Scottish Academy. “William Crosbie RSA: 1915-1999.” In 1999 RSA Annual Report. London: RSA Journal, 1999. https://www.royalscottishacademy.org/artists/390-william-crosbie-rsa/overview/
Green, Christopher, and John Musgrove. "Cubism." Grove Art Online. 2003. https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000020539.
Tate Britain. “Surrealism” In Art Terms. 2020. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/surrealism#:~:text=Surrealism%20aims%20to%20revolutionise%20human,the%20disregarded%20and%20the%20unconventional.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso Books. 2006. p. 9.