Archibald Standish Hartrick:
The Creeps, c.1939
Framed (ref: 5973)

Signed, titled and inscribed in pencil

Red and black chalks, pen and ink, watercolour

Tags: Archibald Standish Hartrick chalk pen and ink watercolour men portraits 1.PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

Provenance: Charles Cundall

Exhibited: The Arts Council of Great Britain, A.S. Hartrick, cat nr 49

Literature: A Painter's Pilgrimage through Fifty Years by A.S. Hartrick, Cambridge University Press London, 1939, page 58, 59.

Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.233.

In 1886, while studying in Paris, the Scottish painter Archibald Standish Hartrick (1864-1950) became acquainted with a number of the key figures of Modern Art. These included Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Joseph Crawhall of the Glasgow Boys group. 

 He later published a lively account of his meetings in a memoir titled A Painter's Pilgrimage through Fifty Years. In this, Hartrick wrote that Crawhall was a ‘genius in the sense that he did everything in his own way, and that no one else could follow (…) I first met him in Paris, where he was living at the same hotel as myself. He never went to work in any atelier there that I can remember, though he had entered one under Aimé Moror, the painter of horses and battle pictures; but wondered about Les Halles, the great market there, where he found subjects that suited him. I think he only completed one drawing in Paris – that of a bell – but he was always tearing up what he had done if it did not achieve what he was after. It is a curious fact, I remember, that his favourite work in the Louvre was Courbet’s ‘Man with a Leathern Belt’. 

 Hartrick states that Crawhall ‘looked and rode like a Jockey’, and recorded him as such in this portrait drawing which he later reproduced in his memoir.