Martin Hardie
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 338
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James McBey was born at Newburgh, a little fishing village on the Aberdeenshire coast, on December 23, 1883. Educated in the village school, he passed, at the age of fifteen, into the North of Scotland Bank, Aberdeen. He was seventeen when he first fell under the spell of what Samuel Palmer called the "teasing, temper-trying, yet fascinating art" of etching. The years 1902 to 1909 form the first phase of the artist's career. To that , period- with a gap of two years (1906-7), when he gave all his spare time to painting - belong sixty prints. In July, 1910, McBey cut his cables, and embarked on his great adventure. With a few pounds in his pocket, he left the Bank, and sailed for Holland, to fling his hat to the windmills. "No man who is instinctively an etcher," Sir Frederick Wedmote once wrote, "can keep himself for ever absent from the great flat lands that inspired Rembrandt." No man was ever: more instinctively an etcher than McBey, and the result of his visit to the land of low-lying distances, and big skies, of canals and mills, was a Dutch Set of twenty-one plates. The work of 191 0 and 1911 forms a distinct second phase in McBey's career, culminating with the first exhibition of his work, held at the gallery of Goupil & Co., in November, 1911. Well-known critics - notably Mr. James Greig of the Morning Post and Mr. Malcolm Salaman were quick to appreciate the newcomer, and wrote with enthusiasm of his work. In 1914, 'the inspiration of London's river-not Whistler's Thames, but a river of , bustling activity and movement--caused a new revelation of the artist's power. In January, 1916, McBey' war service began in France. There, though thwarted by rain, mud, and difficulties of transport, he found the material for five plates, etchings that will have lasting value as records of our Western Front and of all the grim tragedy of war. They show us the devastating activity of great howitzers; the pathos of the cemetery where crosses,' row on row, marked the graves of unknown soldiers. The War over, and his "First Palestine Set" issued, McBey enjoyed the study of portraiture and character in the peaceful surroundings of his new studio in Bolland Park Avenue.The "Second Palestine Set;' published in 1920, consists of eight plates giving a vivid, historic record of the march over Sinai in 1918, the crossing of the border, the Australian Camel Corps pushing on to the attack of Beersheba in an encircling cloud of dust, the first sight of Jerusalem, and that dramatic moment when the surrender of the Holy City was received by two sergeants of the London Division. At last McBey was free from all official obligations of the War, and at liberty to make what etchings he chose. He promptly translated a drawing he had made seven years before into that pregnant dry-point, A Flood in the Fens. . . .
