2nd Dragoon Guards - Mounted Trooper by William Kennedy, 1885

William Kennedy (1859-1918) was one of the radical young painters known to art history as ‘The Glasgow Boys’. United by their disillusionment with academic painting, they came to represent the beginnings of modernism in Scottish art. In the early 1880s they painted contemporary rural subjects, and often worked out of doors sketching and painting directly in front of their subject. When Kennedy established a studio in Stirling, and gained a reputation for painting accomplished rural landscapes, he also found inspiration in military life centred on Stirling Castle, the depot of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders from 1881. In fact, he produced so many military themed paintings that the Glasgow Boys dubbed him ‘The Colonel’. 

His boldly-coloured depictions of individuals or groups of soldiers on manoeuvres in King’s Park close to where he lived, followed the example of the French Post-Impressionists, in creating highly decorative compositions, rather than renderings of what he actually saw. In many of these works the horizons are high, the colours vivid and the overall aim one of pattern-making rather than description. 

Kennedy was born in Glasgow and trained at the Paisley School of Art. Like Sir John Lavery and several other prominent members of the group he continued his studies in Paris at the Acadamie Julien. He joined the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, and upon returning to Scotland set up his own Cambuskenneth, Stirlingshire, around 1885. In 1887 he was elected president of a society formed by the Glasgow Boys. Like many Scottish artists before and since he moved south. He settled in Berkshire in the 1890s, and married fellow painter Lena Scott in 1898. They later moved to Tangier in 1912 where scenes of Moorish life were added to his repertoire.