Select a Story

 

The Glasgow Girls


Christian Jane (Chris) Fergusson


Anna and Isobel Hotchkis


Jessie M King


Jankel Adler


Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell


William Hanna Clarke


William Daniell


James Faed Junior


John Faed


Susan Bell Faed


The Faeds


David Gauld


Francis Grose


Tom Gourdie


George Henry


E. A. Hornel


James G (Tim) Jeffs


William Miles Johnston


Oskar Kokoschka


William Stewart MacGeorge


John Maxwell


Henry Joseph Moule


Charles Oppenheimer


James Paterson


Samuel John Peploe


William Bruce Ellis Ranken


William Robson


Charles William Stewart


Alick Riddell Sturrock


E A Taylor


Jim Sturgeon


JMW Turner


Edward Arthur Walton


Archie Sutter Watt


Jemima Wedderburn


Christopher Whall


George Wright


Jankel Adler

Jankel Adler (1895-1945) is perhaps the artist, whose work in Galloway had the greatest influence on other British artists.  Born in Tuszyn a suburb of Lodz in Poland Adler studied painting at the Barmen School of Art in Germany.  A friend of Paul Klee in Dusseldorf in the early thirties he left Germany in 1933.  An associate of Picasso in France he joined the Polish army there at the outbreak of World War II.  He was evacuated to Scotland in 1940.  Invalided out of the army in 1941 he was associated with another Polish artist in Glasgow Josef Herman and also began to influence Scottish artists notably William Crosbie.  

 

It was a visit or visits to the new Kilquhanity School near Castle Douglas in 1942 that led him to spending about six months in Kirkcudbright with the aim of building up a portfolio of work for exhibition in London.  Adler probably worked in the old mill, later Tommy Lochead’s pottery and left for London to exhibit at the Redfern Gallery in June 1943.  In London he met up with the two young Scottish artists Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, known as “The Two Roberts”.  Starved of European influence as they were, Adler had an enormous effect on Colquhoun, MacBryde and others, which continued after the war through his involvement with the Anglo French Arts Centre.

 


Adler lived for a time at 77 Bedford Gardens where other residents at the end of the war included Ronald Searle (who had also visited Kirkcudbright at the beginning of the war) and John Wyndham.  He died at Aldbourne in Wiltshire in 1949.