Gallery displays rare painting to mark International Women’s Day

The National Galleries of Scotland is marking this year’s International Women’s Day by celebrating its purchase of a rare painting by one of Scotland’s most accomplished female artists.

Bacchanale by Olive Carleton Smyth (1882-1949) is now on show at the National in Edinburgh as part of a free display of work created by women who trained and taught at Glasgow School of Art in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The painting, which was produced in the early 1920s, depicts a group of musicians and revellers dancing through a mountain forest with wild animals and is only the second painting by the artist to enter a UK museum collection.

The work is described by experts as being “full of wild, exuberant colour and action” featuring “incredible minute details” on the dancers’ clothes and the gold musical instruments they play.

The acquisition was made possible by funds from the Cowan Smith Bequest, the Iain Paul Fund and the Treaty of Union Bequest.

The gallery announced the acquisition ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8.

Charlotte Topsfield, senior curator of British drawings and prints at National Galleries of Scotland, said: “We are so excited to have acquired this remarkable work by Olive Carleton Smyth.

“A dynamic artist, who worked across so many different media, Olive is an outstanding representative of the extraordinary generation of women who trained and taught at the Glasgow School of Art around 1900.

“Full of colour, energy and amazing detail, Bacchanale is an intriguing and spectacular painting and we hope our visitors love it as much as we do!”

Born in Glasgow, Smyth studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1899.

Joining the staff in 1903, she taught a variety of decorative and fine arts courses, including metalwork, woodblock printing, poster design, manuscript illumination and miniature painting.

Smyth left the Glasgow School of Art in 1915 to concentrate on creating work for exhibition and teaching at Westbourne School for Girls in Glasgow.

She returned to the Glasgow School of Art as Head of School of Design (Pictorial and Commercial Art) in 1933, teaching stage design and the history of costume.

Smyth’s earliest exhibited works were miniature portraits, followed by watercolours and line drawings on vellum.

Her drawings appeared in The Studio, a prestigious fine and decorative arts magazine, and she exhibited regularly at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts for over 40 years from 1904.

She also showed her work internationally at the Paris Salon in 1913 and in Lyon, Munich and Cork.

Her work often combined a strong sense of colour with incredibly precise and tiny detail.

She drew inspiration from a range of sources, from Celtic literature and folklore to Shakespeare, Ibsen, Art Nouveau, Leon Bakst’s designs for the Russian Ballet and contemporary theatre design.