pastel on paper, signed
framed and under glass

Provenance: Collection of Percy Bale Esq.
Note: Like so many of the other distinguished West of Scotland painters of that era, James Kay was a student at Glasgow School of Art. He also studied closely from nature, and developed early a distinct and colourful method of his own but influenced by the emergence of Impressionism in the 1880s.. He shared studios at first with two other young artists, James Stuart Park and David Gauld in Glasgow. He is not considered to be one of the ‘Glasgow Boys’, although he was friendly with many of them, especially Guthrie, George Henry, and E.A.Walton. Kay worked in a distinctive style and he achieved swift and considerable success both at home and abroad which in turn gained him the widespread respect and admiration of his peers. His first picture in the Royal Academy was 'Towed into Harbour on the Clyde', hung in 1889 and bought by a prominent English collector, and his first in the Paris Salon was in 1894. From then on he had works on display in most of the important exhibitions in Britain, Europe and America every year. In 1903 his canvas, ‘Toil and Grime’, a picture of shipping at the mouth of the River Kelvin, was awarded the silver medal and diploma of the Société des Amis des Arts at Rouen in France. The same year his ‘River of the North’, a winter scene in Glasgow’s busy harbour, gained the highest honour a foreign artist can receive at the hands of the Salon jury and of France when it was awarded a gold medal, and was purchased for The Luxembourg Collection. In 1906, he won the gold medal and diploma at the 37th Exposition Municipale des Beaux Arts de Rouen, where his picture ‘Winter’ was purchased for the Rouen Municipal Collection. The following year his ‘Launch of the Lusitania’ in the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts was bought by the Corporation of Glasgow for the municipal collection. His subjects were wider than just the Clyde and shipping. He painted Glasgow city scenes and some of the Thames, and still farther afield, in pictures like ‘The Armada’ and ‘The Revenge’ which embody the sea romance of Elizabethan days, and in France, where he spent a lot of time, and Holland. 'Clyde Nocturne', a study of the Broomielaw (Glasgow), hangs in the National Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand. The Royal Scottish Academy hung over eighty of his paintings and he also exhibited prolific numbers at the Royal Glasgow Institute and at Glasgow Art Club. UK public collections include Glasgow Museums & Galleries, The Hunterian, Aberdeen, Dundee, Paisley, Leeds, Bradford, Newport, The City Art Centre (Edinburgh), the National Trust for Scotland and the Royal Scottish Academy.