JAMES WATTERSTON HERALD (SCOTTISH 1859-1914)
HORSEMEN AND VIOLINIST OUTSIDE AN INN
Signed, watercolour 
20.5cm x 31cm (8in x 12in)
Few Scottish watercolourists can claim a style as distinctive as that of James Watterston Herald. His innovation was to depict his subject by painting only the light, in its manifold hues, using fluid and suggestive strokes of watercolour or pastel. This effect was often achieved by working on a black, grey or brown ground, which allowed his coloured highlights to sing. Herald was largely self-taught, which does something to explain the originality of his technique. It is also evident that throughout his life he was content to follow his own path with little heed to convention or popular artistic trends. Yet his talent spoke for itself, and he was hailed by his contemporaries as a rival to Melville as a watercolourist, and to Whistler as a pastel artist. Herald worked in Edinburgh in the 1880s and London in the 1890s, but from 1901 returned to his native Angus where he would remain forthwith: it better suited his reclusive tendencies. His removal from the London art scene likely prevented his reputation from flourishing in the manner it might otherwise have during his lifetime. Fortunately, today his importance is better appreciated. Fiddle players recur throughout Herald’s oeuvre. Herald was himself a fiddler and regularly played at local taverns; sometimes a tune would earn him a drink, and Herald may be making a humorous allusion to this very scenario in Horsemen and Violinist Outside an Inn. The Young Violinist is a superlative example of Herald’s pastel technique, replete with deftly-handled light and shadow. Dappled sun filters through gauzy drapes, casting green flecks across the violinist’s dress and pooling in pale pink on the polished floor. Her music carries across a sprawling terraced garden which Herald suggests using successive lines of green and yellow glimpsed through the window.