The Willows

Edward Arthur Walton was born in Renfrewshire in 1860 and received his early training at the Kunstacademie in Düsseldorf and the Glasgow School of Art. Early in his career he met Guthrie and Joseph Crawhall and like them, he was profoundly affected by the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage as is shown in his early paintings of shepherd boys and country children. Although he excelled as a portrait painter, Caw noted that 'it is, however, as a painter of landscape, or of figure associated with landscape, that Walton has won his most distinctive success'. The present work is one of Walton's later examples and it is this period in his oeuvre that Caw particularly compliments, 'There is more than the visible beauty of the world in such pictures. They are imbued with that informing spirit which makes Nature more to us than mere inert matter. The sap and substance of growth and life seem to run through them, the imagination which animates them is deep-rooted in the earth, and beside them most contemporary landscape-painting looks poor and lifeless' (see J.L. Caw, Scottish Painting, 1975, pp. 371-2). op. cit., p. 372).