James Cowie

(b Cuminestown, nr Turriff, Aberdeenshire [now Grampian], 16 May 1886; d Edinburgh, 18 April 1956). Scottish painter. He studied English at Aberdeen University (1906-9) and trained as a teacher at the United Free Church Training College in Aberdeen. In 1909 he became an art master at the Fraserburgh Academy and he held various teaching posts until 1948. From 1912 to 1914 he studied at the Glasgow School of Art, but it was not until 1935 that he had his first one-man show at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow. His work was characterized by a cool objectivity and restrained palette, as in In the Classroom (1922; Aberdeen, A.G.). Of all painters he was most influenced by Paul Nash, whose work he probably discovered in the mid-1920s, in particular by his use of spatial ambiguity and multiple-point perspective as in Composition (1947; Edinburgh, N.G. Mod. A.).

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