The Glasgow Girls display
Free to visit
National Galleries Scotland: National
Until 8 June 2025
To mark International Women’s Day (8 March) the National Galleries of Scotland is celebrating the acquisition of a painting by one of Scotland’s most accomplished female artists, Olive Carleton Smyth (1882─1949).
“This vibrant work forms part of National Galleries of Scotland’s mission to represent the extraordinary generation of Scottish women who trained and taught at the Glasgow School of Art in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Bacchanale is now on show at the National as part of the free display, The Glasgow Girls, (until 8 June 2025) alongside four exquisite drawings by renowned Scottish artists Jessie M King and Annie French.
Smyth’s work is extremely rare, with Bacchanalebeing only the second painting by the artist to enter a UK museum collection. Described by a contemporary as ‘small, fast talking and tweed suited’, she was an important figure in the Glasgow art world for over 35 years. Smyth was a brilliant and versatile artist and an effective and inspiring teacher for many generations.
Bacchanale is an energetic painting, created in the early 1920s, which beautifully depicts a group of musicians and revellers dancing ecstatically through a mountain forest, sweeping up wild animals in their midst.
The rhythmic, frieze-like composition and use of shimmering metallic paint is typical of a 1920s Art Deco design. The stylised poses of the figures are probably inspired by Japanese prints, as are the intricately patterned textiles they are wearing.
The painting is full of wild, exuberant colour and action, but also has incredible minute details – the dancers’ clothes have flamboyant spots and chevron prints and even the gold musical instruments are covered in tiny, engraved patterns.
It is full of symbols associated with Bacchus, God of wine, theatre and festivity, including gold pinecones, flower garlands and the thyrsus, a wand wreathed in ivy. Smyth may have been inspired by her love of the stage, as themes of Classical mythology were popular in theatre and dance in the early 20th century.
For over ten years the National Galleries of Scotland has been proactive in acquiring more works by women artists for Scotland’s national collection, which spans roughly from 1300 to the present day.
More needed to be done to represent works by female artists in the collection, and to reflect the important role of women artists in the history of art.
The representation of more works by Scottish women artists has been integral to the creation of the Scottish galleries at the National, with Bacchanale the latest to go on display.
Works by female artists pre-1945 are considerably rarer due to the nature of art training and the constraints put on women wishing to pursue art as a profession until well into the 20th century. However, the National Galleries of Scotland is determined to celebrate pioneering female Scottish artists such as Olive Carleton Smyth.
Born in Glasgow, Smyth studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1899. Joining the staff in 1903, she taught a wide variety of decorative and fine arts courses, including metalwork, woodblock printing, poster design, sgraffito (a ‘scratching’ technique widely used in decorative arts), gessos (a plaster-based substance used for decorative modelling and as a base for painting), manuscript illumination and miniature painting.
Smyth left the Glasgow School of Art in 1915, concentrating on creating work for exhibition and teaching at Westbourne School for Girls in Glasgow. She returned to the Glasgow School of Art as Head of School of Design (Pictorial and Commercial Art) in 1933, teaching stage design and the history of costume.
Smyth’s earliest exhibited works were miniature portraits, soon followed by watercolours and line drawings on vellum. These were described by a critic as ‘about as splendid as Beardsley could have done’.
Her drawings appeared in The Studio, a prestigious fine and decorative arts magazine,and she exhibited regularly at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts for over 40 years from 1904. She showed her work internationally at the Paris Salon in 1913 and in Lyon, Munich and Cork.
In 1912 Smyth’s drawing Peer Gynt was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada from an exhibition in Toronto. Her work often combined a strong sense of colour with incredibly precise and tiny detail.
She drew inspiration from a rich range of sources, from Celtic literature and folklore to Shakespeare, Ibsen, Art Nouveau, Leon Bakst’s designs for the Russian Ballet and contemporary theatre design.
Bacchanale was likely exhibited in Glasgow in 1922 and in 1929 was presented to the Paisley Art Institute. The Paisley Art Institute was founded as an artists’ collective in 1876 for the ‘encouragement of Art Studies and the promotion of a taste for Art’ and the Institute continues to champion and nurture contemporary Scottish artists work to this day.
In 2024, the Institute made the decision to sell selected works from their collection, to raise funds to safeguard the remainder of its collection and to create new awards for artists.
Charlotte Topsfield, Senior Curator of British Drawings and Prints at National Galleries of Scotland, said: ‘We are so excited to have acquired this remarkable work by Olive Carleton Smyth.
“A dynamic artist, who worked across so many different media, Olive is an outstanding representative of the extraordinary generation of women who trained and taught at the Glasgow School of Art around 1900.
“Full of colour, energy and amazing detail, Bacchanale is an intriguing and spectacular painting and we hope our visitors love it as much as we do!’
The acquisition was made possible by funds from the Cowan Smith Bequest, the Iain Paul Fund and the Treaty of Union Bequest.