The William Syson Collection

During his lifetime, William Syson was not only a patron of the arts, but also a keen collector. His collection of paintings, furniture and objects is diverse but reflects, significantly, his support of local talent, with numerous works by Scottish artists, many of whom studied or taught at Edinburgh College of Art.

The bulk of his collection draws on the oeuvre of his close friend, the St Andrews-born artist Beatrice M.L. Huntington (1889-1988) and that of her husband, the painter William Macdonald (1883-1960), and a selection of these paintings are being exhibited at Harvey & Woodd in Edinburgh in June. Excelling at music and art at an early age, Beatrice Huntington pursued her talent for painting and drawing in Paris, at the age of 17, and subsequently at a private art school in Munich. She was also an accomplished cellist, spending a summer in Leipzig in 1924, under the tutelage of the cellist Julius Klengel.

William Macdonald also studied in Paris at the dawn of the 20th century, before setting up a studio in Edinburgh. He is perhaps best-known as a landscape painter, with several of his Spanish and Canadian landscapes represented in the collection.

Beatrice Huntington and William Macdonald met in Scotland in the 1920s, marrying in Edinburgh in 1925, and together they travelled the Continent, returning frequently to Cassis on the French Riviera and to Southern Spain. Key paintings in the collection date from this era and reflect both Macdonald’s love of Spain – which earned him the nickname ‘Spanish’ Macdonald – and Huntington’s brief engagement with Modernist art, best seen in her celebrated portrait A Muleteer from Andalucia, 1923 (right, now owned by the National Galleries of Scotland) and in her striking portrait of Scottish cellist, Isobel Neillands, The Cellist, mid 1920s.