Edward Baird (artist)

Edward Baird was born in Montrose in 1904, the son of a sea captain. He was descended from a long line of seafarers, but poor health throughout his life meant that he was unable to follow his forebears to sea. His father was lost at sea when he was a small child, and so he was brought up by his mother, living at various properties on Montrose High Street.

He was educated locally at Montrose Academy, and was accepted into Glasgow School of Art in 1924. He studied there for a total of four years, finishing as an undergraduate in 1927, and winning the Newbery medal as the top student of the year. After a year's postgraduate teaching diploma, he spent four months- from December 1928 to March 1929, travelling and studying in Italy, funded by a travelling scholarship provided by Glasgow School of Art.

On his return from Italy, Baird moved back to Montrose and began a career as a portrait painter For a time, he was involved in the nascent "Scottish Renaissance" movement in the town, and with early Scottish nationalist politics. Alongside the author Fionn MacColla, and local businessman such as Allan Ogilvie and Andrew Dalgetty, Baird participated in a lively branch of the newly founded National Party of Scotland in the town, until the early 1930s, and designed one of the earliest extant logos for the NPS, which was used locally in Angus.

Baird's method of working was slow, painstaking and based on thorough and exhaustive research of the subject at hand. He found it difficult to draw or paint something unless he had a profound knowledge of the subject. This proclivity, together with lengthy periods of ill health, saw him complete barely 40 paintings and a similar number of drawings during his career. Baird was plagued with chronic asthma and heart trouble, in addition to being a heavy cigarette smoker.

Baird's early 1930s portraits focused on individuals close to him, and those associated with the Nationalist movement. He painted MacColla in Portrait of a Young Scotsman in 1932, and the picture received very favourable reviews after exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and the Royal Academy in London. Alongside his portraiture, Baird experimented with a kind of Surrealist painting in Birth of Venus, painted in 1934 and given as a wedding present to his close friend and colleague, James McIntosh Patrick.

By the mid-1930s, all the early energy of the National Party of Scotland in Montrose had dissipated and, disillusioned, Baird turned more towards a socialist-inspired vision of ordinary working people and the effects that the long industrial depression of the 1930s had on his locality. The 1936 canvas, Distressed Area, shows an empty Montrose harbour, looking out across Rossie Island and the River South Esk, to the North Sea.

...
Wikipedia