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Overview
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.
By the time McBey arrived in Venice in 1925, Whistler's Venetian prints were famous and celebrated. McBey incorporated the lessons of his predecessor but added his own unique sensibility to his etchings of this oft-depicted city. Fellow etcher and friend Martin Hardie recalls McBey's ardour for Venice and his rush to create etchings:
'Never have I known anyone with such untiring energy and passion of work. He began at dawn; he spent hours at the end of the Rialto or at a table under the shady colonnade of the Chioggia Café in the Piazzetta, making pen-and-ink notes of figures; or in a gondola on the canals or the Giudecca, making studies of shipping, of buildings and their reflections; at night he would be out again in his gondola, working on a copper plate by the light of three tallow candles in an old tin!'
This etching is taken from the Fondamenta delle Zattere, an extensive quay where gondoliers have secured their boats. The dome and campanile of the Basilica of San Marco, as well as the Doge's Palace, are visible across the Giudecca Canal. It is some skyline! But equally important is the water of the canal that dominates the composition. McBey has an unerring sense of figure and ground, qualities that are often applied to an artist like Gordon Walters but equally appropriate to this less overtly modernist or abstract artist.
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
Portland Art Museum, http://portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=50459;type=101
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art June 2018