Kirkcudbright, art town
Feb. 26th, 2024 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI have been dithering about our trip to Scotland in April, but at last I have compiled an itinerary, and made all the bookings, and I am feeling pretty pleased with myself. The grit at the heart of this pearl is a mid-week stay at the Castle of Park, a Landmark Trust property in Galloway: booked by friends, but I was happy to accept the invitation to join them. We will travel there by way of the Cumbrian coast, where there are, among other attractions, Roman sites I have never visited (despite Cumbria bordering the county in which I live); and when we leave Castle of Park we will head (just a little) further north and west to the Ayrshire coast, before looping back to Kirkcudbright for a last couple of days before we return home. So it must be time to complete this post in (very slow) progress about our previous visit to Kirkcudbright. As I said then, the town is celebrated for its artists, and is not embarrassed about it, either:
If the tourist literature tells you about the town's artistic nature, you can take it with a pinch of salt: but the yarn bombers do not lie. This vestige of the previous weekend's art trail places art alongside the NHS, than which there is no higher accolade. There's more formal evidence at the Kirkcudbright Galleries, which describes itself as "a regional art gallery of national significance," opened in 2018: artists with a local connection downstairs, visiting exhibitions upstairs.
Until a few minutes ago, I would have told you that the town's best-known and most successful artist was Edward Atkinson Hornel: but he doesn't seem to merit a mention in the Galleries' description of their collection. Which is odd, because his work is prominently displayed in the gallery itself. I tracked him down to his page in the Galleries' 'In the Artists' Footsteps' virtual collection: their selection doesn't do him any favours, because it underlines just how many of his paintings were of young girls in flowering landscapes. He could paint other things, and did, particularly early in his career. But these were the ones that sold well, and enabled him to buy Broughton House (now in the care of the National Trust). It's a very fine house, with a very fine garden, which is in part a recreation of gardens Hornel had seen in Japan:
He was also a bibliophile, and amassed one of the world’s largest collections of works by Robert Burns. Even cooler, he acquired the MacMath Collection, the papers of William Macmath, one of the main Scottish collaborators in the ballad collecting work of Francis James Child. But I digress...
Broughton House also has a gallery / showroom in which Hornel could display and sell his paintings, and a separate studio where he worked, which now houses an artist-in-residence. At the time of our visit this was Evan McClure. He wasn't actually present while we were there, but I liked his painting A Lofty Vantage which was prominently displayed in the Galleries - and here's a video of him talking about it:
He compares his work to that of Charles Oppenheimer, who was also a neighbour of Hornel's. At one point he rented the house next door to Broughton House as Hornrell's tenant, and more than once I found myself admiring a painting of Broughton House and then discovering it wasn't by Hornel but by Oppenheimer. I liked some of his paintings very much: something about his treatment of buildings and light. It was no surprise that he also painted scenes for railway posters, as this recreation of his studio reveals:
I was also very taken by his painting of a dam under construction.
I mentioned in my previous post about Kirkcudbright that we had seen an exhibition of Jessie M. King's drawings of the town: I don't seem to have said then how much I liked them, so I'll say it now. Why is there not currently in print an edition of her Kirkcudbright A Royal Burgh, which would be my perfect souvenir of the town if it weren't so expensively collectable. (She was a student of Charles Rennie Mckintosh at Glasgow School of Art). I was less enthusiastic about some of her other work. The Dumfries & Galloway Hall of Fame put it well: "The sheer amount of her output means that her quality is variable, from very good to disconcertingly poor, with pretty-pretty wide-eyed nymphettes in some of her later work." At the meeting point of those twee fairies and her architectural drawings is The Little White Town of Neverweary, which I would love to get a closer look at:
It's a story book which includes the buildings of the town for the child reader to cut out and construct - but would any child ever have been permitted to cut up this big, impressive book? I don't know what the Galleries have done here, but they do display some of the buildings of Neverweary. There's quite a resemblance to the buildings of Kirkcudbright. The internet doesn't offer any interior pages of the book, although copies do come up for sale, so some at least must have survived unmutilated - they are, of course, very expensive. In 2016 Scottish Opera produced an interactive show for 5-8 year olds inspired by the book: the soprano who sang in it blogs about it here, and if you want to know more, the trailer is on YouTube.
In case all this makes Jessie M. King sound a bit fey and impractical, she was also a practical supporter of younger, mainly women, artists. Here's an introduction to the Greengate Close coterie - and here's Greengate Close:
If the tourist literature tells you about the town's artistic nature, you can take it with a pinch of salt: but the yarn bombers do not lie. This vestige of the previous weekend's art trail places art alongside the NHS, than which there is no higher accolade. There's more formal evidence at the Kirkcudbright Galleries, which describes itself as "a regional art gallery of national significance," opened in 2018: artists with a local connection downstairs, visiting exhibitions upstairs.
Until a few minutes ago, I would have told you that the town's best-known and most successful artist was Edward Atkinson Hornel: but he doesn't seem to merit a mention in the Galleries' description of their collection. Which is odd, because his work is prominently displayed in the gallery itself. I tracked him down to his page in the Galleries' 'In the Artists' Footsteps' virtual collection: their selection doesn't do him any favours, because it underlines just how many of his paintings were of young girls in flowering landscapes. He could paint other things, and did, particularly early in his career. But these were the ones that sold well, and enabled him to buy Broughton House (now in the care of the National Trust). It's a very fine house, with a very fine garden, which is in part a recreation of gardens Hornel had seen in Japan:
He was also a bibliophile, and amassed one of the world’s largest collections of works by Robert Burns. Even cooler, he acquired the MacMath Collection, the papers of William Macmath, one of the main Scottish collaborators in the ballad collecting work of Francis James Child. But I digress...
Broughton House also has a gallery / showroom in which Hornel could display and sell his paintings, and a separate studio where he worked, which now houses an artist-in-residence. At the time of our visit this was Evan McClure. He wasn't actually present while we were there, but I liked his painting A Lofty Vantage which was prominently displayed in the Galleries - and here's a video of him talking about it:
He compares his work to that of Charles Oppenheimer, who was also a neighbour of Hornel's. At one point he rented the house next door to Broughton House as Hornrell's tenant, and more than once I found myself admiring a painting of Broughton House and then discovering it wasn't by Hornel but by Oppenheimer. I liked some of his paintings very much: something about his treatment of buildings and light. It was no surprise that he also painted scenes for railway posters, as this recreation of his studio reveals:
I was also very taken by his painting of a dam under construction.
I mentioned in my previous post about Kirkcudbright that we had seen an exhibition of Jessie M. King's drawings of the town: I don't seem to have said then how much I liked them, so I'll say it now. Why is there not currently in print an edition of her Kirkcudbright A Royal Burgh, which would be my perfect souvenir of the town if it weren't so expensively collectable. (She was a student of Charles Rennie Mckintosh at Glasgow School of Art). I was less enthusiastic about some of her other work. The Dumfries & Galloway Hall of Fame put it well: "The sheer amount of her output means that her quality is variable, from very good to disconcertingly poor, with pretty-pretty wide-eyed nymphettes in some of her later work." At the meeting point of those twee fairies and her architectural drawings is The Little White Town of Neverweary, which I would love to get a closer look at:
It's a story book which includes the buildings of the town for the child reader to cut out and construct - but would any child ever have been permitted to cut up this big, impressive book? I don't know what the Galleries have done here, but they do display some of the buildings of Neverweary. There's quite a resemblance to the buildings of Kirkcudbright. The internet doesn't offer any interior pages of the book, although copies do come up for sale, so some at least must have survived unmutilated - they are, of course, very expensive. In 2016 Scottish Opera produced an interactive show for 5-8 year olds inspired by the book: the soprano who sang in it blogs about it here, and if you want to know more, the trailer is on YouTube.
In case all this makes Jessie M. King sound a bit fey and impractical, she was also a practical supporter of younger, mainly women, artists. Here's an introduction to the Greengate Close coterie - and here's Greengate Close:
