Lot 359: Louis Reid Deuchars (1870-1927)

Dochfour and Aldourie
signed 'L R Deuchars' (lower left) and further signed and inscribed as title (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
17 3/4 x 33 1/2 in. (45 x 85.1 cm.)

Possibly London, Royal Academy, 1901, no. 429.

The Fraser Tytler family, Aldourie Castle, Inverness.

Louis Reid Deuchars was a young Glaswegian artist who sent a parcel of drawings to G.F. Watts in 1891 with a request for advice. 'Perhaps my mother was right when she said 'leave that nonsense alane, laddie", he wrote, 'but I couldn't and I often feel I would go mad if I didn't paint something'. Watts tried to get him employment with Hubert von Herkomer, and when Herkomer rejected him on the grounds that he would 'never do anything with his art', he took him on himself. Before long Deuchars was a valuable assistant in the pottery that Watts's wife Mary was beginning to develop at Compton in Surrey. By 1897, he was conducting a pottery class, and in 1900 he helped Mary set up another at Dores, near Aldourie, her family home overlooking Loch Ness. He is seen with two of the Compton Pottery's 'scroll' pots in a photograph in Veronica Franklin Gould's monograph G.F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian, Yale, 2004, p. 322, fig. 206.

Although Deuchars eventually gave up painting to concentrate on sculpture, he exhibited a number of pictures during his association with Watts. Two works, one of them a portrait of the master, appeared at the New Gallery in 1899, and three more were shown at the Royal Academy between 1899 and 1904. In 1899 Deuchars gave his address as Limnerslease, the Wattse's house at Compton. In 1901 he was still at Dores in Scotland, and by 1904, the year Watts died, he had found independent accommodation at 51 St John's Wood Terrace in London.

It has been suggested that Dochfour and Aldourie was painted when Deuchars accompanied the Wattses to Scotland in July 1899. Watts himself painted a number of landscapes during his four months in the Highlands, often making use of a makeshift studio set up on the moors near the lodge at Dalcrombie, the house belonging to his wife's brother where the party stayed. The picture has the same provenance as two views of Torness that Watts painted at this time, one sold in these rooms on 16 June 2005, lot 89, the other lot 358 in the present catalogue.

But would Deuchar' view present such an autumnal or even wintry aspect if it had been painted between July and October 1899, the months Watts and his entourage spent in Scotland? If not, it should perhaps be identified with Loch Ness in Winter, the picture Deuchars showed at the Royal Academy in 1901. This had presumably been painted not in 1899 but in the winter of 1900-1, when the artist was helping Mary Watts to establish a pottery at Dores.

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