Lucinda Mackay

There is one letter from Lucinda Mackay to Ruth Borchard, dated 'October 4th 1971', from London SW7. She mentions that she had already seen Ruth's collection, when Ruth's son, Richard, had invited her to see it in Reigate. She goes on to say, 'Although I have a self-portrait at present, it is rather a hurried piece of work, and I should like to give you something rather better. I shall do another self-portrait before Christmas [...]'

Painted around late 1971, as the letter indicates, Mackay's self-portrait shows her aged thirty or so – she was born in 1941 in Berkshire, the daughter of the third Earl of Inchcape, and brought up in South Ayrshire – at a time when Women's Liberation, and a radical resurgence in awareness of the rights and social predicaments of women in society, was coming strongly to the fore. Mackay portrays herself as a self-assured, somewhat alternatively fashion-conscious young woman of her time: the chic, wide-brimmed hat, black feather boa and ivory dress with lace-trimmed sleeves and cuffs forming a tastefully theatrical ensemble with roots in Victorian/Edwardian, ethnic and hippyish fashion. Her long, casually dishevelled brown hair is complemented by the decidedly bohemian element of the shaggy feather boa. The brushwork expressively evokes gradations of grey and black as it variously catches the light.

Mackay’s pale features are painted so immaculately as to appear initially almost like those of an antique porcelain doll, though there is nothing remotely doll-like in the artist's still, somehow resolute air. The light-filled room (containing what may be a small, bright yellow, pale blue-edged notebook, on what appears to be a windowsill) forms a tranquil, fairly neutral, reflective backdrop. So prominently yet subtly positioned near the centre of the composition, what appears to be a black watch on her upraised left wrist (revealed as holds her black boa in place) may be seen to act as a kind of memento mori, marking or at least alluding to the passage of time and the passing of youth. Curiously, the colours Mackay wears – ivory and black – are traditional, archetypal western colours of the wedding dress and of mourning.

Lucinda Mackay went to school in Britain and Switzerland. Aged eleven, she won an award in a national portrait painting competition. She studied Fine Art at Edinburgh University and College of Art, graduating in 1965; her tutors, and great influences, included Professor David Talbot Rice (1903-1972; the art historian and expert in both Byzantine and Islamic art and the origins of Russian icon painting; after the War, he established an Honours degree at Edinburgh University which combined studio art practice and art history; the Talbot Rice Gallery, an arts centre in the University, which he had hoped to establish, was founded and named after him posthumously), and the renowned Scottish landscape and still life painter, William Gillies (1898-1973).  Mackay's elegantly geometricised, vibrant 1982 painting Pink Tiger Lilies with Red Elephant (Collection: Art in Healthcare, Edinburgh) shows elements of influences from both Gillies and Elizabeth Blackadder.

An exhibition of her 'Prints and Drawings of East London' was held at the Geffrye Museum in London in 1974; the catalogue cover shows a photograph of the artist seated on a bench, intently concentrating on a drawing. A later catalogue entry remarks that 'She has always carried a ready sketch book wherever she goes, recording everyday things as well as vivid dreams.'

In 2001 Mackay had a London show of watercolours of flowers and mythic figures, directly inspired by listening to classical music. In an artist’s statement for the catalogue, she wrote: 'I have loved painting ever since I could hold a paint brush, and I have enjoyed good music all my life. I have also enjoyed teaching art, on and off, over many years, in state and private schools and colleges, in London, Dundee and Edinburgh.' In 1981 she painted a remarkable portrait of Ian Caddy in his role for Scottish Opera as Giuglielmo in Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte; this was one of three commissioned portraits she did of him in his three leading roles for Scottish Opera. She evidently relished painting the sparkling grandeur of his costume, his huge, twirly moustache and whiskers, his dramatic pose as he raises his hand grandiloquently to his chest.

Unlike her own poised and polished self-portrait (except in a few details), many of her later portraits are ambitiously expressionistic, reminiscent in some ways of pictures by Kokoschka and Jack Yeats. Her double portrait of the literary critic Professor David Daiches with his brother Lionel Daiches QC, with two owls perched behind them, evokes the brothers' venerable qualities of wisdom and discernment and also the vulnerability of increasing age – as vivid sunlight is seen falling on David's flowing, gesticulating hands.

What she herself has called 'swirling impasto', a musical maelstrom of vibrant intermingling colours, characterises her 1981 portrait of Peter Higgs (b.1929), the renowned British theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, renowned for his work on the mass of subatomic particles, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh (Collection: National Galleries of Scotland, Scottish National Portrait Gallery) – though the picture's overall effect is serenely deliberated.

Her 2017 portrait of Peter Higgs (hanging in the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation in Edinburgh) is a much more representational work of smooth realism than her 1981 portrait, and in this respect, and in the use of reflected light illuminating face and gesturing hands (Higgs sits here in a comfortable modern armchair – a Newton's Cradle perched on a side table – with upraised right arm as if boldly signalling his intervention in a discussion), it has affinities with the style and approach of Mackay's own (c.1971) self-portrait. In this 2017 portrait, Higgs – in his burgundy sweater and slate-grey trousers, and with distinguished remnants of grey hair and his bushy white eyebrows – appears as the epitome of a senior, modern sage - relaxed, informal and still in mien yet as discerning as ever.

In 2014 Lucinda Mackay presented an extensive range of her sketchbooks, albums, correspondence and a copy of her 1965 Fine Art Honours (Edinburgh) thesis (on 'The Annunciation Scene in Cappadocian Painting') to the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. Amongst the sketchbooks were ones from London in the 1970s, Lausanne and Taipei from 1982, Istanbul in 1995, and the Culross Festival (of theatre, comedy, rock and folk music) in Fife in 1997. There was also a 2006 book of sketches devoted to a 'Dance to celebrate the] Van Gogh exhibition atScottish National Gallery of Modern Art', and further ones from Venice in 2007, Bruges in 2009, and Edinburgh in 2012.

Also presented were her letters from Ian Caddy (c. 1979-2006); Fr Brocard Sewell, the British Carmelite friar and controversial literary figure (c.1980-1988); Professors Sandy Robertson and Francesca Bray at the University of Edinburgh (1980-2010); Dr Emre Araci, the Turkish music historian, composer and conductor who moved to live in the UK in 1987, and who studied music at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1994 (his subsequent 1999 PhD thesis there was supported by Lady Lucinda Mackay and the Inchcape Foundation – the subject being the life and works of Turkey's eminent 20th-century composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907–1991) – these letters from Araci dated from c.1995-2007; Professor Peter Higgs (2010); and Alexander McCall Smith, the renowned writer and Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh (letters from him dating from 2010-12).

As the Scotsman newspaper noted (on 26^th  December 2006), 'The National Portrait Gallery [Edinburgh], which already has two portraits by Lady Lucinda – including one of the late Professor John Erickson, who led the "Edinburgh Conversations" between Scottish and Soviet officials during the Cold War – recently acquired her drawing of Alexander McCall Smith, who dedicated his book, 44 Scotland Street, to the artist.' This 2004 chalk drawing, which shows McCall Smith in one of his well-known giraffe motif ties (he helped set up a law school in Botswana and frequently visits the country), is notable for its immaculate, probing realism and high degree of psychological empathy and candour.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004