Marrakesh

Self-taught as an artist, James McBey (1883-1959) was born in Newburgh near Aberdeen. He worked as a bank clerk from the age of fifteen, learning about art from books. After reading about etching, he became interested in printmaking, producing his first prints using a domestic mangle and building his own printing press. An admirer of Rembrandt's prints, McBey launched his artistic career in 1910 by travelling to the Netherlands. He returned to live in London before working in Egypt as an Official War Artist in 1917. McBey reached the peak of his popularity as an etcher in the 1920s, but when the print market collapsed due to the Depression, he mainly produced portraits on commission. McBey didn't associate himself with artistic movements, but saw himself as a traditional, skilled craftsman. Following his marriage in 1931, McBey lived mostly in Morocco, and during World War Two, the United States. He died in Tangier, Morocco, in 1959.

McBey remains one of Scotland's - and Britain's - greatest printmakers, who intelligently continued in the vein of James McNeill Whistler, and who along with his older contemporaries, William Strang, Muirhead Bone and particularly D.Y. Cameron, constituted an extraordinary body of Scottish etchers. By being essentially self-taught, McBey is arguably the most remarkable of them all.

This is a view of Djema el Fna, the market square of Marrakesh, with crowds of figures, many sunscreens of matting, and the minaret of the Koutoubia in the distance. A late work completed when McBey was in his mid-fifties, it reveals no loss of power as a printmaker on his part. Indeed, it is a marvellous, almost abstract tesselation of people and sunscreens, with the Koutoubia looking almost ghostly on the horizon. McBey and his much younger artist wife Marguerite had made Morocco their home since 1932, where they lived in some prosperity. As he must have reflected, it was a world away from the Newburgh, Aberdeen, of his childhood!

See:

Aberystwyth University Artist Collections, 'James McBey', https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/art/gallery-museum/collections/artist-collections/mcbeyjames/

National Galleries Scotland, https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/james-mcbey

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   June 2018