An Ode to Scotland’s Countryside: Millie Frood’s Swirling Landscapes

By Natascha Watt

 In 1940s and 1950s Glasgow there was a desire to revive the city’s art scene. Artists like the Scottish Colourist J.D. Fergusson and his wife Margaret Morris were a part of this effort, contributing to the revival by founding the New Art Club, which later evolved into the New Scottish Group. The Club met twice a week, held discussions and staged exhibitions. The Club and Group drew inspiration from artistic influences that were arriving in Glasgow from abroad at the time, its members turning towards bolder artistic expression in their work. There is little mention of painter Millie Frood in this context, even though she helped bring about the Club.

Born in Motherwell in 1900, Frood studied at the Glasgow School of Art before going on to teach at Bellshill Academy. She painted and exhibited alongside her teaching job but only received international recognition posthumously (in the U.S.A. and Japan).

In her paintings, Frood depicts Scottish rural life and landscapes. They feature a limited number of figures and are painted in an unusual colour palette with dynamic brushstrokes, differing from her Scottish contemporaries in her abstract expressionist style. Frood was known to be a generous person and would give tours of her studio. It has also been said that she was easily recognisable in her mod-style boots and feather boas.

Millie Frood, October, 1946, Gouache on paper, 64 x 73 cm, Private collection. Image courtesy of Art-Scot.

Continuously looking abroad for inspiration, she always returned to her North Lanarkshire roots, its people and its landscapes in her work. Indeed, she was influenced by expressionist painters in Europe and mingled with the likes of Jankel Adler and Josef Herman. The former had spent time in Paris before living in Glasgow for two years, bringing cubist and surrealist influences with him. Scottish art historian Duncan Macmillan has argued that these influences are expressed in her oeuvre through its depiction of “a startingly and grotesquely realistic image of urban humanity”. MacMillan has also compared her works’ intense colours, patterns and brushstrokes to those of Vincent Van Gogh. Works like the gouache on paper October (1946) highlight the influence of European expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in its bold (almost neon) colours and thick brushstrokes.

 Millie Frood, Workers in a Field, Date unknown, Oil on board, 45 x 68.7 cm (unframed), The Fleming Collection. Image courtesy of The Fleming Collection.

In Workers in a Field (date unknown), humans and nature become one, as she uses the same colours for the three figures in the left of the composition and the piles of hay that surround them. This painting, part of the Fleming Collection, was on show at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh for the exhibition Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception (28 July 2023 – 6 January 2024), hinting at a developing recognition of Frood’s contribution to twentieth-century Scottish art.

Millie Frood, Turning Hay, 1940, Oil on canvas, 74 x 101 cm, NLC Museums. Image courtesy of North Lanarkshire Council.

Moreover, the way that farm work is rendered in her oeuvre allows for it to be rightfully recognised as valuable: farm and field work’s daily tasks along with the hard labour these require are highlighted by Frood, allowing pride for such work to be felt in her paintings through her bold use of colours. An example of this is Turning Hay (1940) in which the yellow hues attribute a golden quality to the hay, highlighting its significance and value. Furthermore, the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature is once more emphasised through a blending of colours, humans and nature, all depicted in serpentine brushstrokes.

Millie Frood, Mechanical Angel, Date unknown, Oil on canvas, 60 x 106 cm, Private Collection. Image courtesy of Art-Scot.

Millie Frood, On the Farm, Date unknown, Oil on canvas, 104 x 135 cm, NLC Museums. Image courtesy of Art-Scot.

However, that is not to say that she idealised rural work. In fact, the dynamic nature of her compositions sometimes have an industrial aspect to them, as seen in her more angular compositions such as Mechanical Angel (date unknown) and On the Farm (date unknown). Here she uses unusual colours such as pink and blue, once more highlighting the influential nature of Expressionism on her work: to depict farm work in an angular and industrial manner, abstracting the scene into something that almost feels as though it was out of this world. Thus, like other artists throughout the twentieth century, she explores the machine, its role and relationship to humans, anchoring these landscapes in her contemporary context.

 The fact that many dates of creation for her works remain unknown exposes the lack of scholarly interest in Frood’s work. This might be because she was a woman or because, as fellow painter Louise Annan has pointed out, her work was too modern for its time in relation to that of her contemporaries. Thus, they could not fully understand and appreciate it.

 In 1958, J.D. Fergusson opened an exhibition of her work, which would have certainly piqued people’s interest in her work. Still, she did not sell many paintings during her lifetime. A year after she died an exhibition (Painting in the Forties) was held by Cyril Gerber, a Glasgow-based art dealer, for which the slogan highlighted her important contribution to twentieth-century art in Scotland: “Members of the New Scottish Group and Millie Frood Studio”. By naming her, the sentence clearly identifies her as a key player in the development of twentieth-century Scottish art, but Scotland still has a long way to go in uncovering its female artists and their contributions, as Frood still goes largely unacknowledged today.

More recently, however, the North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre in Motherwell held an exhibition of her work: Millie Frood: Strange Horizons (3 February – 6 May 2024), highlighting a growing interest in her work.

 Bibliography

Gerber Fine Art. “Paintings of the Forties: Members of the New Scottish Group and Millie Frood Studio 1900-1988.” Accessed 24 March 2025.  http://gerberfineart.co.uk/2014/paintings-of-the-forties-members-of-the-new-scottish-group-and-millie-frood-studio-1900-1988/

Macmillan, Duncan. Scottish Art: 1460-1990. Mainstream Publishing, 1990.

Sayeed, Neha. “The Unspoken Heroines of Scottish Art – a tribute to Millie Frood.” CultureNL Museums. Accessed 24 March 2025. https://www.culturenlmuseums.co.uk/blog/the-unspoken-heroines-of-scottish-art-a-tribute-to-millie-frood/

Shackelton, Rosie. “Millie Frood: Strange Horizons.” Art-Scot, Accessed 24 March 2025. https://www.art-scot.com/exhibition/millie-frood

Shackelton, Rosie. “Millie Frood: strange horizons in North Lanarkshire.” Art UK, 30 January 2024. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/millie-frood-strange-horizons-in-north-lanarkshire