Edinburgh - Scottish National Gallery

Here's my final tribute to the galleries on Princes Street / The Mound Edinburgh.

I was surprised at how the Contemporary and National Galleries are linked,  they are made up of three interconnected buildings, right in the heart of Edinburgh. The Gallery is home to a major part of Scotland’s sensational national collection of fine art; the Academy is one of Europe’s premier venues for international exhibitions; and the Gardens Entrance, which lies beneath the two buildings, provides an entry way directly in to both the galleries and museums and also various lecture halls and learning areas.  Up on the surface though, all you see from Princes street are two Baroque style Victorian buildings based on the Athenian them and Pantheon.  Underneath them though, lies the treasures and public areas such as cafes and shops.  A wonderful juxtaposition of post-modern and old Victorian architecture has been combined into a brilliantly developed public space.  It's well worth a visit, just to see the architecture!


The following paintings by Steven Campbell, 1953-2007 were of particular interest to me as we progressed from the contemporary to the classical / National Gallery sections.  His work, being a turning point in Scottish art which combines the painterly classical style with more contemporary re-presentation using audio;

His themes and reflections of life events seemed to be from a rather disturbed individual at first glance.  He was clearly sensitive to a number of these events which have transformed int the dream like paintings he rendered.  However, on closer examination, there also seems to be a sense of both humour and fascination of design that the artist chose for his subjects.  This fascination for design is comes through from the time that the artist spent initially as an engineer, and the sense of humour is manifested by a sound recorder that is constantly re-playing a 1980s classic french pop song, within the exhibition.

 

Further into the rest of the National Gallery I made some initial notes of the classical paintings to be found there too;

   

 The similarities between Bellotto and Canaletto are easy to see from the above two examples.  The painting below too has the classical perspective landscapes, - only just discovered.

And then Van-Gough.  People often criticise Van-Gogh for "not being able to paint" or some other derogatory remarks.  Well, I can assure them that he could!...  The example below is one of his more famous pieces which came from a series made of observing peasant farmers, - the most famous of his paintings of that period probably is "The Potato Eaters", which he painted in April 1885,  in Nuenen, Netherlands.  I think it is also important to remember that Van Gough was still very much in his learning phase, well before his transformation into the style which so many people criticise unjustly and unfairly.  The original Potato Eaters is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

And then on to another modern artist who again sometimes unfairly gets criticism, one Eduard Degas.  He was fascinated by rythm and dancers. Degas frequently observed the dancers of the Paris Opéra, and was captivated by their grace and discipline. In this sculpture, Degas shows a dancer practising the ‘arabesque penchée’, a position that requires tremendous control. The dancer must stay steady on one foot while raising the other leg as high and as straight as possible. Degas made the original wax model of this figure between 1882 and 1895. Following Degas’s death, Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard made bronze casts of the figure, and designated each one a letter of the alphabet between A and T. This cast is inscribed ‘G’, and the number sixteen is incised above the letter. This number refers to the subject matter; all the casts Hébrard made of Degas’s models of dancers were numbered 1 to 37.

 

I don't think any study of paintings of the late 19th century is complete without one example from the great master of the time, Paul Cezanne (1839 to 1906)).   In this penultimate painting, "The Big Trees" which was painted late in Cezzane's life around 1900 to 1902, he was experimenting through painting rocks, trees, foliage and vegetation.  In this painting, he seems to have left white spaces of the canvas actually showing through, and at the upper third of the picture the branches seem to twist in a bizarrely flat yet angular fashion, - some say that this is an example which lead on to the formation of cubism, which dominated the next few years of Pablo Piccasso and Georges Braque, who very much took their lead and influence from Cezzane in the next development of Art's journey.

Georges Seurat's Alfalfa Fields near St Denis, is my final chosen piece in the Scottish National Gallery.  I chose this simply because of the amazing detail that the painting conjures up of a spring meadow in full bloom.  The other interesting point to note is how Seurat recorded the beginnings of a more industrial landscape in the far background of the painting.  Georges Seurat was particularly interested in the combinations of placing colours next to each other to produce a third colour.  His technique, known as Pointillism, can be seen very clearly in this painting of the Alfalfa fields near St Denis.  He is remembered as a Post-Impressionist rather than an Impressionist, even though he was painting at the same time as Monet, Renoir and the other impressionists.