Born in Wales in 1887, James Dickson Innes was a landscape painter who specialized in mountain scenes. He was educated at Christ College, Brecon and the Carmarthen School of Art before winning a scholarship to the Slade School in London where he stayed for two years.
Despite ill health he travelled extensively in Europe, studying painting and spending time with John Fothergill, Derwent Lees and Augustus John.
His early work consisted of small scale watercolours but he progressed to oils and developed an individual style, characterised by jewel bright colours, inspired by his travels to the continent.
He exhibited his first picture at the New English Art Club when he was 19 years of age and showed an exhibition of water-colours at the Chenil Gallery in 1910. An exhibition of his work was shown at the Tate Gallery in 1921-2 and a further memorial exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in 1923. His work is represented in the collections of the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff, the Tate Gallery, London, the Temple Newsam Gallery, Leeds, the Manchester City Art Gallery, and the Aberdeen Art Gallery. He died in 1914 aged just 27.

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.

See in

  • Art Project