This winter, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will be showing part of an extraordinary private collection. Featuring twentieth-century work by artists as varied as Pablo Picasso, Joan Eardley, Joan Miró, Hans Hofmann, Howard Hodgkin and David Hockney, it also contains superb etchings by Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Odilon Redon and others.
The collection has been assembled over a period of more than fifty years by Henry Walton and his late wife, Sula Walton. Henry Walton was Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of International Medical Education at the University of Edinburgh, and Past-president of the World Federation for Medical Education. Sula Wolff was a famous child psychiatrist, her books internationally acclaimed: Loners: The Life Path of Unusual Children and particularly Children Under Stress are globally known classics.
Together, the Waltons formed a fabulous collection not only of modern art, but also of Japanese prints, oriental ceramics, and African and Oceanic sculpture. Their fine art collection centres in particular on printmaking. Works on show will include Picasso’s linocut Portrait of a Young Girl, after Cranach the Younger, one of the artist’s greatest prints; a huge seascape by Eardley; and works by Anthony Gross, Elisabeth Frink, Richard Hamilton, Graham Sutherland and European artists such as Alexei Jawlensky and Max Pechstein. The display will feature some sixty works, but this is still only a fraction of the collection.
Henry Walton was born in South Africa in 1924 and Sula Wolff in Berlin in 1924. They met in London while undertaking postgraduate psychiatric training, and married in 1958. They lived and worked in Cape Town and New York before coming to Edinburgh in 1962. Their house in Blacket Place, photographed for the National Galleries by Antonia Reeve, was celebrated both for their collection and as much for their hospitality. The collection is a promised bequest to the National Galleries of Scotland.
Speaking of his lifelong passion for collecting, and his belief in the benefits of living with art, Professor Walton said: “Art trains you, through a lifetime, to tell a good picture. Good art grabs you and enables you to regenerate yourself, humanize yourself. It makes you an immeasurably better person.”
Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary art at the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “We are delighted to be showing such an extraordinary collection which promises not only a pure visual delight, but also invokes a sense of awe and admiration for the sheer verve of what a collector on limited means can achieve with dedication, determination, and desire.”
THE HENRY AND SULA WALTON COLLECTION
From 27 November 2010
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART,
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Telephone 0131 624 6200
www.nationalgalleries.org
