Supernova Sunbonnet: The ‘fun girl’ who put the glorious Glasgow Boys in the shade | Painting

AAbout 15 years ago, an eminent art historian was showing me around Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery. When we came to the section on the Glasgow Boys – James Guthrie, John Lavery et al, the late 19th-century pioneers of the naturalist plein-air school of painting – I asked a question: where were the Glasgow Girls? The historian practically laughed in my face: hadn’t I realised the Glasgow Boys were an artistic movement? And they were all men: there were no women.

Today, no one doubts the existence of the Glasgow Girls. A few days ago, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh took possession of one of the most beautiful works by the women who worked alongside the men at the Glasgow School of Art in the final years of the 19th century.

Bessie MacNicol’s The Lilac Sunbonnet (1899) is a light and cheerful painting of a girl in the countryside; her deft brushstrokes capture the dappled rays of sunlight perfectly. Indeed, the work is infused with all that was best about the movement that ushered Scottish painting into the modernist era. It is now clear that many of the Glasgow Girls were at least as good as the Boys, and some of them were even better.

Today, the Kelvingrove appropriately boasts the finest collection of Glasgow Boys: 55 paintings, plus one by their inspiration, the American James McNeill Whistler. In contrast, the Glasgow Girls are represented by just six paintings; two of them, A Girl of the Sixties and Under the Apple Tree, by MacNicol.

The problem, when it comes to the Glasgow Girls, is the same one that curators around the world are facing when it comes to redressing the gender imbalance on their walls. It’s one thing to know that women were there and painting, but quite another to try to track down their work. Much of MacNicol’s work is in private collections; the acquisition of The Lilac Sunbonnet came about because of a rare instance of her work coming onto the market.

MacNicol attended the Glasgow School of Art for five years, from 1887, when she was 18. She was a contemporary of the MacDonald sisters, as well as Jessie Keppie and Katherine Cameron. They, like the boys, studied under the innovative direction of Fra Newbery – but he was not innovative enough to allow female students to paint real-life male nudes. To gain experience in this, MacNicol had to go to Paris, where in 1892 she enrolled at the Académie Colarossi.

The school was one of the first to allow women to paint alongside men – but at a price, as they were charged 100 francs a month, double the fees of their male counterparts. They also had to survive the eccentric Colarossi tradition, whereby nude male models would prance around the studio before striking their pose – a practice that made some female students vomit upon seeing it.

MacNicol, by all accounts, would not have been fazed: she seems to have been a fun-loving girl, prone to a bit of dancing when something took her fancy. She loved music, cycling and fashion, which led curator Charlotte Topsfield of the National Galleries of Scotland to suggest recently that The Girl in the Lilac Cap almost certainly references a novel of the same name by Samuel Rutherford Crockett, which was a huge bestseller at the time and a fashion influencer.

Not yet 30 when she painted The Lilac Sunbonnet, MacNicol should have had a long and successful career ahead of her. Instead, tragically, she would die of pre-eclampsia during her first pregnancy, at the age of 34. Her son died as well.

A later director of the National Galleries of Scotland, James Caw, would describe MacNicol in 1908 as probably the most talented artist his country had ever produced. The Kelvingrove also has a self-portrait: it is much darker than the sunhat painting, and in it MacNicol is serious and grave. She seems to want to tell us something – perhaps we are still trying to work out what it is.