Near Temple by William Gillies (1898-1973) captures a countryside landscape with some loosely captured sheep and emphasis on the groupings of trees throughout the rolling hills. Gillies uses dark lines of watercolour to capture the outline of the sheep and the outlines of the tree's trunks and their foliage shape. These lines are over light washes of watercolour, built upon each other with increasingly richer and darker colours to create the fall foliage or rich green of the evergeens. As the trees expand into the background, Gillies uses thicker outlines and then no outlines at all for the trees, making the paint begin to blend together into a darker brown to create depth in the work, even when working with a medium where that can be difficult. Gillies completes the peaceful atmosphere of the work with a gentle wash of light blue watercolour for the sky, leaving empty spaces void of paint where white clouds would have been.

Gillies was a well known watercolourist, as well as a colourist who employed vibrant colour throughout his work to capture the brightness of a scene and give it life. The ability to create depth through an otherwise often flat medium speaks to Gillies's mastery of watercolour when depicting landscapes. The loose details of the sheep and trees possibly suggest this painting was captured in Plein Air style, with Gillies painting the scene in the same moment he was viewing it. 

Sir William George Gillies RA RSA PRSW, 1898-1973

Gillies was born in Haddington, East Lothian. His training at Edinburgh College of Art between 1916 and 1922 was interrupted by two years' war service in France. He and William MacTaggart were among the artists who formed the '22 Group, exhibiting at Edinburgh's New Gallery between 1923 and 1928. Awarded a travelling scholarship, Gillies studied in Paris with André Lhote in 1923-24 before visiting Italy. In 1926 he took up a part-time position under David Alison at Edinburgh College of Art, where he became Head of Drawing and Painting in 1946. He was principal from 1960 to 1966, exerting a powerful influence on the younger generation on painters. Gillies worked in oil and watercolour, but it is as a watercolour painter of Scotland's landscape - particularly Lothian and the Borders - that he is best remembered.