biography of James MCBEY (1883-1959)

Birth place: Newburgh, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Death place: Tangier, Morocco

Addresses: Philadelphia, PA; NYC; Tangier, Morocco

Profession: Etcher, portrait and landscape painter

Studied: in Aberdeen, at Gray"s Sch. Art and privately (hon. degree, LL.D., Aberdeen Univ. )

Exhibited: Royal Scottish Acad., 1909; Royal Glasgow Inst., 1909; AIC, 1922-41; PAFA Ann., 1946; Goupil Gal., London (solo of 55 prints); Wesleyan Univ., 1982.

Member: he avoided all memberships

Work: Boston Pub. Lib. (large coll. of his etchings and watercolors); Davison Art Center, Wesleyan Univ. (large coll. of his etchings); Mystic Seaport Mus.; British Mus., London; Imperial War Mus.; Egypt; Palestine; Syria.

Comments: Along with D.Y. Cameron and Muirhead Bone, he was one of the great Scottish master etchers whose works were actively sought by American collectors during the first few decades of the 20th-century. Wanderlust marked his career, for he traveled throughout Britain, Spain, Palestine, and Morocco; and, in 1917, he was official artist with the British Expeditionary Force in Egypt. After the war, he was in Venice, where he produced some of his greatest drypoints, stylistically similar to those of Whistler. By the 1920s, speculators were driving the prices of his etchings at auction to extraordinarily high prices when compared to current buying power. His etchings even sold for more than those of Rembrandt and Dürer. He made his first trip to America in 1929 for a solo exhibition of his portraits in NYC. Here he met his future wife, and the two continued to travel extensively. He made etchings in New York, California, and Maine. His total output of published images was 291. He became a citizen in 1942, and after the war he spent most of his time in Tangiers, drawing and painting until he died there of pneumonia. McBey"s style of etching and drypoint clearly influenced Kerr Eby and Levon West.

Sources: WW47; WW59; exh. cat., by Jane Allinson, "Three Scottish Printmakers: Cameron, Bone, and McBey" (Davison Art Center, Wesleyan Univ., 1982); Falk, Exh. Record Series.