JAMES FERRIER PRYDE (1866-1941)
J & W BEGGARSTAFF Also known as BEGGARSTAFF BROTHERS: WILLIAM NICHOLSON AND JAMES PRYDE (1894-1899)

Description / Expertise

James Pryde exhibited twelve paintings from 1909 onwards which made use of a bed as their central theme. The two most important of these being The Doctor (Tate Gallery, London) and The Death Bed exhibited at the International Society's exhibition of 1913. Pryde believed that the bed is important due to the fact that we spend so much time on it and because we are born and die there. His inspiration for the very distinctive bed, which is used throughout the series, is the four-poster in Mary Queen of Scots' bedroom at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh.

Pryde's use of somber colours in his work resulted not only from his desire to create a feeling of drama, but also because he believed that subtle almost monochromatic tones were more evocative than the use of colour. In this respect he was influenced by Whistler who was also a great believer in tone. Pryde had visited Paris in his early career where he studied under Bouguereau but had responded more to Daumier in his tonal use of pigment.

In 1893 his sister Mabel married William Nicholson with whom Pryde was to form the Beggarstaff Brothers, the joint name with which they signed their work done on poster designs. The technique that they used involved pasting areas of black paper on a white ground and had a tremendous affect on later poster design.

`Watercolour had a special significance for Pryde, for it was the medium that he most often used in “mapping” (as he called it) his larger works. Like Hogarth, he drew little from nature, but stored his mind with images. After his impressions and memories had `incubated', it was in watercolour that he usually made his first `note'.

Hence these little watercolour or gouache sketches - they were, as a rule, only five or six inches in height - have a peculiar intimacy; they are comparable to his letters in their directness and simplicity, being set down without a thought of the public eye. A writer in Drawing (April, 1919) summed them up very well:

“These water colours are so fully charged with the personality of the artist that they are almost startling. They are queer, with a northern queerness, rather harsh and dry, leaving in the mouth, as it were, a taste of bismuth, suggesting in their stark utterance that untutored touch of the amateur which belongs, I believe, to all the greatest work in some degree, the cherished remnant of naivete, perhaps, that has clung to the man through all the scramble of the schools.”(1)


1. Derek Hudson, James Pryde 1866-1941, Constable, London, 1949, page 75.