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| THE FOREST EDGE, TAHITI |
William Alister Macdonald was a watercolour painter who specialised in scenes of London and, in particular, the sights and traffic of the Thames. He worked in the manner of such topographers as Herbert Menzies Marshall and William Lionel Wyllie, but also acknowledged the experiments of James McNeill Whistler and French Impressionist and Post-Impressionists.
The son of a Scottish Free Church Minister, Macdonald was living in North London by the eighteen-eighties, and during the closing years of the century was exhibiting watercolours at such venues as the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists.
After 1900, Macdonald greatly expanded his repertoire by making a number of painting trips abroad, including Sicily (1902), Holland (1904), Venice (1906), Tunis (1912) and Rome (1913). From 1925, he made the first of several visits to the South Pacific, living for a while in Paul Gauguin’s house on Tahiti.
Macdonald held two exhibitions, of earlier and later work, at the Arlington Galleries, Bond Street, which was managed by his wife, Lucy Winifred Cary. The first was entitled, ‘Among the islands of the South Seas...Impressions in Watercolour’ (1935), and the second ‘Prewar Wanderings: Watercolours at Home and Abroad’ (1936). (The Guildhall Art Gallery still holds a collection of watercolours which it purchased at the latter.) Then in 1942, his earlier work was again remembered with the publication by Walker’s Gallery of the volume Watercolours and Drawings of Old London previous to 1914.
Macdonald died at Pao Pao, on the Ile de Moorea, in French Oceana, on 11 August 1956, at the age of 96.
Exhibition: The Chris Beetles Summer Show 2007
