oil on board, signed
framed

Provenance: Titled and dated (1966) on Open Eye Gallery (Edinburgh) exhibition label verso. Open Eye Gallery purchase invoice available to the purchaser.
Note: John Bellany was known to be working on "Scottish Fish Gutter" at the same time as "Allegory 1964" (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art). "The Fish Gutter" might well have been started at around the same time but the Open Eye Gallery label dates it to 1966. The figure depicted in "The Fish Gutter" is understood to be an actual fish gutter from Port Seton who was a member of a small religious sect. The irony that a messianic and self-righteous believer could at the same time slaughter and gut fish so mercilessly would not have been lost on Bellany. There is the added significance that in Christian iconography the fish is a symbol of Christ. It is well documented that Bellany exclusively used hardboard until 1969. ''In 1969 Bellany painted his second triptych Homage to John Knox. It brought together the principal themes in his work at the time and was heavily influenced by Max Beckmann's painting "Departure". This was (almost) the last time Bellany painted on hardboard. He now began painting on canvas, which he found frustrating for the first six months until he got used to the 'tooth' of the surface. The change altered his technique. His use of glazes and meticulous handling were replaced by a more modern and overtly expressionist style''. This change defines two very significant periods in Bellany's work. Early pre 1970 work on board and his later body of work, on canvas. John Bellany's early work is highly prized by collectors and their appearances at auction are ever rarer. Because many of his early works were on a monumental scale, much of it is simply too large for private collectors and furthermore many of the early larger paintings are now held in public collections. It is extraordinary to contemplate that Bellany was only in his early twenties when he painted these exceptional works about which London Standard art critic Brian Sewell later commented ".... in the 1960s (Bellany) painted such pictures as to make us think him as a painter with Rembrandt". In 1963 and 1965 Bellany and Sandy Moffatt staged "protest" exhibitions of their work during the Edinburgh Festival, first on the railings in Castle Terrace and then on The Mound steps (beside the Royal Scottish Academy). The Bellany/Moffat outdoor exhibitions were a watershed for Scottish art in two ways: they proved that it existed, and they showed the way for a radical new direction. The works included "Allegory", later acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, "The Gospel Spreaders" "The Finnon Smoker (1965)" (sold McTear's Sept 2022 for £80,000 hammer) and only a few other stunning tableaux, now mostly in public collections. "We were rebellious characters," remembers Moffat. "That was the period when our generation did make a stand. There was very little representation of Scottish art at the festival ... (we thought] if we can't get in the official festival, we'll put it into the streets. Scottish art didn't really exist. It existed in the studios of Edinburgh College of Art, but it didn't exist in the arts establishment, which was completely Anglicised, I believe. There has been an enormous sea-change. It's almost impossible to measure, but I think we had a hand in the beginning of that, the turn of the tide." It meant Port Seton, it meant fishermen, it meant working people – that had never been painted before. People had painted fishing boats, but nobody had ever painted about the life of people who did the fishing. That was John's fantastic contribution. "His place in Scottish art is defined by the Port Seton thing. That's really his life's work, the way he has mythologised the life of the fisherman. The fears, the spirit, the whole thing, the way he found the special imagery, that had never been done before, to say all those things – that puts him into the history books forever." Keith Hartley, senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, agrees. "What he was doing in the mid-1960s in many ways changed the course of Scottish painting. It was like a manifesto: I don't want to do paintings for Edinburgh drawing rooms, I want to do something which moves people, about ordinary people's lives. It was very much a protest." Two hundred and seventy-nine of John Bellany's artworks are held in UK public collections. His work is also held by The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA), the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. David Bowie was an enthusiastic collector (and become a close friend) from a relatively early age and owned multiple examples including "Fishermen in the Snow, 1965" (sold David Bowie Collection September 2016, Sotheby's for £85,000 hammer). Damien Hirst is also known to have acquired many of Bellany's paintings and in 2003 praised him as "one of the major painters of the twentieth century."
"The Fish Gutter" has been in a private Scottish collection for approximately twenty years and represents an ever rarer opportunity to acquire an early oil on board work by John Bellany.