by Kitty Cruft, John Dundar & Richard Fawcett.
This is the ninth volume of the Pevsner Architectural Guides to the Buildings of Scotland
The Scottish Borders has some of the most romantic countryside in Scotland, ranging from rocky coastline to rolling moors and farmland. The early buildings reflect a pattern of prosperous settlement subsequently marred by three centuries of Anglo-Scottish warfare. A testament to a more peaceful past are the ruins of the great Borders abbeys - Coldingham, Dryburgh, Jedburgh, Kelso and Melrose - one of the most impressive groups of monastic churches in Europe, while more modest medieval survivals are numerous among the small parish churches. A host of powerful castles and tower houses, including such celebrated strongholds as Neidpath, Newark and Hermitage, are all now better understood and more accessible than when Scott and Wordsworth first put them on the tourist map. Through the border counties loops the river Tweed, which provides the setting for the burghs of Peebles, Galashiels, Melrose and Kelso. Here are fine Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian public buildings alongside the remains of the once mighty textile industry, ranging from small weavers' cottages to large nineteenth-century mills. Country houses of exceptional variety and quality, include some of the most important houses in Scotland: from Thirlestane Castle, with it's interiors of royal pretention, Traquair, perhaps the ideal of Scottish architecture, Palladian grandeur at Paxton, the stunning Adam interiors of Mellerstain, baronial wit at Playfair's Floors Castle, ducal comfort at Bowhill and Edwardian opulence at Manderston. One man above all, however, has set his stamp: Sir Walter Scott, whose home, Abbotsford, is of world reknown as the fount of nineteenth-century Scottish Romanticism. Its atmospheric interior, rich in antiquarian relics, is one of the earliest to have been designed to receive tourists. Little-known shooting and fishing lodges, fram steadings, Art and Crafts villas, Art Deco schools This comprehensive and revealing guide also seeks out little-known shooting and fishing lodges, rural steadings, Arts and Crafts villas, Art Deco schools and even the extraordinary High Sunderland, a building of Miesian purity by Peter Womersley made the Borders architecturally on eof the most enticing regions of Scotland.
Hardback - 841 pages - 130 x 222mm
Four Scottish painters, S.J. Peploe, J.D. Fergusson, G.L. Hunter and F.C.B. Cadell, born between 1871 and 1883, were to become known as "The Scottish Colourists". While they had exhibited together in London and Paris in the 1920s and early 1930s it was not until 1948 that the term was applied to the group when an exhibition of their work was held in the gallery of T. & R. Annan & Sons in Glasgow
The Scottish colourists added a new dimension to Scottish painting and they have influenced generations of later artists. They had in common a painterly approach derived from their Scottish artistic ancestry, an instinct for the expressive properties of paint and an overriding joy of colour. All lived and painted for periods in Paris and the south of France. The work of the Colourists had been little known or appreciated outside Scotland until recently, but it has been increasingly sought by Scottish collectors and exhibited in many of the major galleries over the last thirty or so years. In response to this interest the price obtained for their paintings has escalated sharply. The year 2000 saw a wider public exposure of the work of the Colourists with an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, later mounted at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. These exhibitions were completed by the showing of collections of Colourist paintings and drawings in a number of commercial galleries in London and Edinburgh. There were also television and radio programmes and numerous newspaper articles on the artists and their art.
This volume provides an account of Leslie Hunter's background and life, and illustrates the diversity of his artistic endeavours over a thirty-year career. In addition to listings of his work currently in public collections and that shown in previous major exhibitions, the Appendices include a consideration of the commercial performance of his pictures, both during his life and subsequently up to the present time.
Derek Ogston CBE FRSE is a Honorary Research Fellow in History of Art and an Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Aberdeen. Formerly he held the Regius Chair in Physiology followed by a Chair in Clinical Medicine, and for 10 years was a Vice-Principal of the University
A number of painters of Scottish rural life emerged in the latter years of the nineteenth century. One of these was George Smith, a little studied and currently unfashionable artist. His principal themes were the farming and related activities of his time, including the farm animals and their relationship with man. He painted mainly at locations in Stirling, Kinross, Perthshire and the Lothians from the turn of the century up to the early 1930s. He also depicted the landscapes of the Western Isles, in particular the Outer Hebrides, and made occasional painting forays to other places, both in Scotland and abroad.
This short account of the life and work of George Smith concentrates on his paintings of farming and country life. These reflect the way of life at the time as recorded in accounts of Scottish farming history and preserved in photographs of the period. Together they provide a record of a bygone era, one that fewer and fewer will remember.
Derek Ogston CBE is a Honorary Research Fellow in History of Art at the University of Aberdeen. Formerly he held the Regius Chair in Physiology and later a Chair in Clinical Medicine, and for 10 years was a Vice-Principal of the University.
