National Galleries Scotland: The Story of The Lilac Sunbonnet

Starting this summer, visitors to the National Galleries Scotland: National will be able to view a rare, newly acquired painting, Bessie MacNicol’s The Lilac Sunbonnet (1899)

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  • The Lilac Sunbonnet
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The work is freely accessible in the National's new Scottish galleries on the Mound. We speak to Charlotte Topsfield, Senior Curator of British Drawings and Prints, to find out more about what makes this work and this artist so very special

Who was Bessie MacNicol as an artist? 

Bessie MacNicol was born in Glasgow in 1869 and trained at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) between 1887 and 1892. Glasgow in the late 19th century was an industrial and economic powerhouse, offering rich opportunities for artists and designers, and the GSA was one of the most advanced art schools of the time. Under the leadership of Francis Newbery and his wife, Jessie Rowat Newbery, the school offered a broad curriculum in art and design and was particularly supportive of female staff and students. It must have been a fantastically dynamic and creative place to study – MacNicol’s contemporaries included Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret and Frances Macdonald, and Katharine Cameron.

The GSA nurtured individual talent and MacNicol flourished there, winning prizes for painting. By comparison, when she went on to study in Paris at the Académie Colarossi, she found the training quite restrictive. She was delighted, however, to be able to study great paintings in the Paris museums and she is said to have ‘haunted the galleries’!

What do we know about the subject and creative context of her painting The Lilac Sunbonnet? What makes it such a special piece to you?

The light in the painting is beautiful but I actually love the girl’s assertive pose! Her appearance is pretty and fashionable but she looks in control and slightly quizzical. We think The Lilac Sunbonnet was inspired by a romantic novel of the same title by the Scottish author S.R. Crockett. The book was a massive bestseller in the 1890s – it crops up frequently in contemporary newspaper articles and people even went to fancy dress parties as ‘The Lilac Sunbonnet’! In the novel, Ralph Peden, a prim divinity student, falls in love with golden-haired Winsome Charteris, a farmer’s granddaughter and owner of the lilac sunbonnet. In the process his ideas about women get shaken up a bit – I think the girl in this painting knows her own mind enough to challenge prejudices.

The Lilac Sunbonnet by Besse MacNicol; a painting in broad strokes of a young woman standing under a tree wearing a lilac hat.
Besse MacNicol, The Lilac Sun Bonnet (1899), purchased with funds from the Cowan Smith, MacDougall and Treaty of Union Bequests. Photo by Neil Hanna

Are there any contemporary parallels you would draw with MacNicol's work in terms of subject and composition?

In paintings such as The Lilac Sunbonnet, MacNicol explores the effect of sunlight, broken and dappled by foliage, on her subject, a farmworker. Painting rural life – and working outdoors – was popular among Glasgow artists from the 1880s onwards, influenced by the realism of contemporary French and Dutch art. Her interest in capturing flickering sunlight was shared with Glasgow Boys James Guthrie and David Gauld, who was a friend and had been a fellow student at the GSA. MacNicol was also friends with another Glasgow Boy, EA Hornel – they exchanged ideas about painting and she visited him in Kirkcudbright. She painted a wonderful portrait of Hornel, which belongs to the National Trust for Scotland.

This is a rare acquisition – why are MacNicol's works so sought-after? And how was this piece secured for the collection?

Bessie MacNicol was original, experimental and technically accomplished, and she was recognised by her contemporaries as a major Scottish painter. She ran her own studio in Glasgow and she exhibited internationally in Munich, Ghent, Vienna, Venice and the USA, all within four years. Tragically she died while pregnant with her first child, aged 34, and much of her work was lost or dispersed after her death. Her paintings rarely appear on the market – we were lucky enough to bid successfully on The Lilac Sunbonnet at auction.

This is the latest in a series of works by pioneering Scottish women artists to enter the collection since the Scottish galleries’ opening last year. What are the hopes around building the collection and redressing the balance in representation?

We are actively trying to address the gender balance of our displays at the National and to highlight the contribution of women artists to Scottish art. Since 2020, we have acquired works by Scottish women artists ranging in date from about 1810 to the 1930s. These include groups of drawings by Phoebe Anna Traquair and Mabel Royds, watercolours by Alice Boyd and Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, and prints by Ethel Gabain and Flora Macdonald Reid. It is an ongoing process – the challenges faced by women artists in training, exhibiting and joining professional societies often mean that their careers are less documented and their work can be harder to track down. But it is so exciting when the right picture, like The Lilac Sunbonnet, comes along and we have the chance to tell a different story!


You can enjoy the dappled light of The Lilac Sunbonnet at National Galleries Scotland: National
Open daily 10am-5pm, Free
To find out more visit www.nationalgalleries.org