Elizabeth Blackadder & John Houston | 29 July - 10 September 2023

Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston met at Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s. John was born in Buckhaven, Fife, in 1930 and Elizabeth in Falkirk in 1931. They married in 1956.

Both artists enjoyed hugely successful careers in their lifetimes and were long-term, committed Royal Scottish Academicians. Both were lecturers at Edinburgh College of Art, John as Deputy Head of the School of Painting and Drawing. Elizabeth was showered with accolades in her lifetime, becoming the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and Royal Academy, London. In 2001 she was appointed Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland.

On her death in 2021, Elizabeth left a significant gift to the RSA with the intention of supporting the Academy and its aims. Known as the RSA Blackadder Houston Bequest, the gift has already initiated a wide series of opportunities including new prizes, bursaries and travel awards for graduates and mid-career artists.

This exhibition celebrates the shared journey of these two enormously influential artists, widely considered champions of the ‘Edinburgh School’ that flourished under the Modernist principles of their tutors William Gillies and Robin Philipson. Whilst on first sight John’s expressionist, painterly style may seem to bear few similarities with Elizabeth’s finely observed still lifes and botanical studies, their practices were intimately connected by their travels and the creative milieu of their home in the Grange, Edinburgh.

Elizabeth and John were staunch advocates of the RSA and the Blackadder Houston Bequest is significantly furthering the reach of the Academy’s support of creative practice in Scotland. Many current Academicians were close friends and colleagues of Elizabeth and John and the exhibition is accompanied by their recollections about the artists. These memories perhaps best demonstrate the wide-reaching impact of Elizabeth and John’s creative partnership on Scottish art.