Elizabeth Blackadder valuation
Scottish painter of flowers, cats and still lifes laid out across open space, and the first woman in both academies.
Elizabeth Blackadder was born in Falkirk in 1931 and studied fine art at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1954 with a first-class degree and a Carnegie travelling scholarship that took her to Italy.
What a work by Elizabeth Blackadder is worth
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Bio
Elizabeth Blackadder was born in Falkirk in 1931 and studied fine art at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1954 with a first-class degree and a Carnegie travelling scholarship that took her to Italy. William Gillies was among her most important teachers. She married the painter John Houston in 1956 and taught at Edinburgh College of Art from 1962 until 1986. She painted landscapes, portraits and above all still lifes, flowers and cats, arranging objects across wide, open grounds, in oil and especially watercolour, and visits to Japan from 1985 brought Japanese subjects and techniques into her work. She was the first woman elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy, was made a Dame in 2003, and died in Edinburgh in 2021.
Blackadder was prolific, and watercolours of flowers and cats, prints and drawings come up often; large oils are fewer. A provenance through her galleries in Edinburgh and London is usual, and condition matters in watercolour, especially fading.
Falkirk, Edinburgh and the Royal Academy
Her White Still Life, Easter won the Guthrie Award at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1962. Her work is in Tate, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
She designed a series of Royal Mail stamps, and in 2012 painted the official Christmas card of Scotland's First Minister.
Pressed flowers, Kyoto and the Glasgow Print Studio
Blackadder grew up at 7 Weir Street in Falkirk and as a teenager collected and pressed local flowers, labelling each with its Latin name, an interest that returned in the plant paintings. At Edinburgh she studied early Byzantine art and wrote her dissertation on William MacTaggart, and in 1954 the Carnegie scholarship paid for three months in Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy looking at classical and Byzantine work. In the 1960s she painted landscapes in France, Spain and Portugal as well as Scotland, and closer acquaintance with Matisse lightened her palette.
She first went to Japan in 1985 and returned the next year, and the oils and watercolours that came out of the Zen gardens of Kyoto, with their weight on empty space, were shown at the Mercury Gallery in 1991. From 1985 until around 2014 she worked with the master printers at Glasgow Print Studio, mostly on etchings and screenprints, with some lithographs and woodcuts, of cats, flowers and her travels in Europe and Japan.
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