HUGH BUCHANAN

NEW TOWN

1
Hugh Buchanan New Town
7 June 1 July 2017

16 Dundas StreetEdinburgh EH3 6HZ

+44 (0) 131 558 1200
mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

Exhibition sponsored by
 [1]
royal high school doorway
watercolour 56 x 38 cm
T H E S C O T T I S H G A L L E RY
edinburgh mmxvii
4
 THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN STONE
Hugh Buchanan paints Edinburghs New Town
dunc a n m acmill a n

Whil e our new cit y spreads around / Her bonny wings on fairy
ground, thus Robert Fergusson celebrated the New Town. And it was
indeed new. Building had begun in 1767, five years before he wrote Auld
Reekie, his epic of Edinburgh, from which these lines come. So 2017 is
the quarter millennium of our new city first spreading her bonny wings.
Celebrating its 175th anniversary, The Scottish Gallery was founded just a
few years after building stopped, for the New Town was never completed.
It was nevertheless a great experiment in planned social order. The size of
the hole left in Craigleith Quarry whence came the stone from which it was
built was such that the Great Pyramid of Giza, inverted, would scarcely
have filled it. So it follows that in social effort and volume of stone moved,
the New Town is equivalent to one of the seven wonders of the ancient
world. It should be celebrated accordingly especially at this significant
anniversary, but there is little sign of that publicly at least. How much
more welcome then are Hugh Buchanans paintings celebrating, not just
the New Town, but the whole of Georgian Edinburgh. They capture its
beauty, too, not as some battered fossil that has survived by chance (though
maybe chance has mattered more than design), but as it is lived in now. He
reminds us to look again and see that for all that has changed, its beauty is
still there to inspire if we do but pay attention.
The Great Pyramid was built for one dead man, the New Town for the
many and the living; the Pyramid symbolises hierarchy; the New Town is
purposefully anti-hierarchical. Uniform exteriors give no clue to the rela-
tive wealth of those who dwell within. Indeed, following Robert Adams
example in Charlotte Square inspired by Diocletians Palace at Split, the
grand facades of Moray Place, Great King Street and elsewhere calmly
propose that everybody lives in a palace. With communally owned gardens
and views to the natural world beyond, as the human order of its geometric
streets merges with that wider order and so is part of it, not apart from it,
the New Town was and is a philosophic city, the Enlightenment in stone.
The first artist to give adequate expression to its ambition was
Alexander Nasmyth with two major paintings, Edinburgh from Princes Street
and Edinburgh from Calton Hill. The former shows the Old Town and the
New Town: history and the future in harmony with the world beyond. In
the foreground the building of what is now the Royal Scottish Academy

5
celebrates art and learning at its heart. The other picture, Edinburgh from
Calton Hill, with a view across the city in the warm northwestern light of
a late midsummer evening, shows the citizens enjoying their leisure and
recreation as Nasmyth celebrates the profound humanity of the ideals that
inspired their city. To embody the idea of the philosophic city too, he has
placed the tomb that Robert Adam designed for David Hume dead centre
in his composition. (Both these pictures were also a deliberate, democratic
riposte to the servile flummery of George IVs visit and the painters who
recorded it.)
F.C.B.Cadell followed Nasmyth and celebrated the New Town as it is
lived in. The interiors he painted, particularly of his flat in Ainslie Place,
are masterly. Most striking of all is Orange Blind [see p.18]. Like Nasmyths
picture, it is set on a midsummer evening. The orange blind glows with
light pouring in from the sun low in the north west. In his picture, Cadell
explores the ideal of harmony built into the very stone of the New Town.
The proportions of the buildings throughout and indeed in Edinburghs
other Georgian buildings, for the New Town has no monopoly, are
Palladian and as Rudolf Wittkower showed many years ago, Palladios
proportions were based on the Platonic theory of proportion in music.
Thus harmony is extended, through mathematics, into architectural space
and structure.

[2]
surgeons hall study
watercolour 38 x 56 cm

6
 Cadell seems to have reached this idea quite independently for the key
to his painting is the pianist. His music fills the room, not aurally, but
visually. The dominant colours, green and orange, are secondaries, the
minor key. The picture is a sonata in a minor key, Schuberts Sonata in
B Flat Minor, D.960, perhaps, beautiful, poetic and reflective, but now all
realised through space, light, colour and geometry.
Hugh Buchanan pays a lovely homage to Cadells picture in his own
variations on the theme of an orange blind drawn in a high Georgian
window. Seen from outside, the astragals are silhouetted against the light
within. They also cast a grid of shadow on the blind, but then in Playfair
Window II [cat.10] there is even the hint of a third grid as light from the
street catches the lower edges of the astragals. This whole complex of inter-
locking grids within the wider rectangle of the window plays variations on
the Golden Section. In the largest version of this composition, which is
simply called Cadells Orange Blind [cat.11], part of the channelled masonry
beneath the window is also visible. Irregular trapezes of stone flanking the
central keystone visually support the grid of the window, but they also play
a further variation on the theme of the Golden Section. Buchanan then
subtly subverts all this Euclidian geometry, however. First of all he feathers
the bottom of the blind at a casual angle to the main grid. Then the flowing
forms of the cast iron balcony are silhouetted against the rectangles of

[3]
dundas house study
watercolour 38 x 56 cm

7
the window. They create a cadenza arching over the formal structure of a
wonderful concerto.
Buchanan also works a variation on the theme of the orange blind
in pale yellow. At the Dentist [cat.18] offers a further variation with light
glowing through a glazed door and the fanlight above it framed by the
shadowy exterior wall. Blinds and bright sunlight also feature in two of
several exquisite paintings of Georgian interiors.
All Hugh Buchanans paintings are in watercolour. William Blake
detested what he called the blotting and blurring demons of oil paint.
Buchanan feels much the same and so has always eschewed oil for water
colours much greater luminosit. As Turner demonstrated so brilliantly, it is
the supreme medium for painting light. It is transparent and if you paint on
white paper, its whiteness will always shine through. Buchanan sometimes
tints it with yellow, but that doesnt dim it. It only makes the light warmer.
He also frequently abrades the painted surface to expose again the pure
white of the paper beneath the paint as a pattern of sparkling light.
When Lord Elgin travelled to Greece and brought back the Elgin
Marbles, he took with him as draughtsman a watercolour painter, Gio-
vanni Battista Lusieri. Lusieri was no ordinary watercolour painter, how-
ever. Like Arthur Melville after him, he was ambitious for the medium
and painted on a far larger scale than anybody had done before. In this
Buchanan follows both his great predecessors. The major works here
are five feet high. Whatever Lusieris ambitions, however, Elgins choice
may have been primarily practical. Even on a large scale watercolours are
much more portable than oil paintings. Nevertheless it also acknowledged
the affinity between watercolour, with its command of light, and classi-
cal architecture, also a language of light. In the southern sun where it
originated, cut in marble or white limestone, its sharp lines create relief
through contrasts of bright light and deep shadow. It translates well to
the softer light of the north however, especially realised in the soft greys
and golds of Edinburghs Craigleith stone. Geologically, this is an Old
Red Sandstone, too, a stone hard enough to take and to preserve across
the centuries (if it is not brutally cleaned as tragically some buildings have
been) all its clear lines and intricate geometry. Hugh Buchanan captures
its qualities in his paintings of one of the gates of the Royal High School,
of the entrance to Old College, of West Register House and of a beautiful
Doric doorway in Broughton Street.
The first of these, Royal High School Doorway [cat.1], is a superb study
of classical form, but in addition, sunlight brings out the warmth of the
stone. The slope of the street, the angle of the shadow and the decora-
tive iron gate also add variety. These things together soften the formality
of the architecture and so reconcile it with the untidy world of which it
is part: the ideal is reconciled with the real. The paintings of the Doric
doorway in Broughton Street are also a reminder that domestic classicism

8
 [4]
old college steps study
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

9
 [5]
charlotte square interior with chair II
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

10
was not confined to the New Town and how widely accepted this classical
language was. These latter pictures are also a homage to A.J.Youngsons
The Making of Classical Edinburgh, however, itself a classic, whose publica-
tion fifty years ago marked the bicentenary of the New Town. Youngsons
book gave us a full account of the magnificence of the citys scheme for
the first time. It is also illustrated with photographs by Edwin Smith
about which Ian Gow writes later in this catalogue including a particu-
larly fine one of the Broughton Street doorway. Fifty years later at this so
little-noticed quarter millennium, Hugh Buchanans exhibition and The
Scottish Gallerys initiative in proposing it, are the nearest thing we have
to Youngsons celebration of Edinburghs grandeur.
Buchanans paintings of the entrance to Old College are also superb
studies of classical form. With its twenty-five-foot, monolithic Roman
Doric columns, this entrance is one of Robert Adams grandest creations.
Buchanan certainly does justice to its Roman grandeur, but in his pictures
he also pays close attention to the actual steps and with them how these
buildings are lived in and used. As a river wears down stone, so a river of
learning, the tread of countless students feet over the centuries, has worn
away even hard Craigleith stone. Once perfect, the steps are now uneven.
Life qualifies classical grandeur even as it is enhanced by it.
Embodying the Enlightenment, it is fitting that Old College should be
seen not in the light of day, but in Tail Lights, South Bridge [cat.27], touched
by the red glow of brake lights and of the traffic light that has caused the
cars to stop. Both are reflected on the huge blocks of stone that support
Adams monolithic columns. Artificial light like this is definitive of the
modern world, but in a series of very striking works Buchanan shows how
it can add new drama to the great geometry of classical architecture and
so, too, how that is still topical.
The Orange Blind pictures use both internal and external artificial
light. With Dundas House, Surgeons Hall, the Dean Institute, and the
Royal Scottish Academy, he paints the buildings dramatically lit by artifi-
cial light. In Dundas House [cat.30], the facade of the palace that William
Chambers built for Henry Dundas or more accurately intruded into the
New Town on his behalf is brilliantly lit against the night sky. Thomas
Campbells statue of the Earl of Hopetoun standing by his horse is sil-
houetted against the light. In Surgeons Hall [cat.29] the Ionic columns
of the portico are similarly in dramatic silhouette. In The Dean Institute
by Night [cat.32], Thomas Hamiltons orphanage and now part of the
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Buchanan again uses silhou-
ette, but he also goes closer to the detail of the building. Detail becomes
his whole subject in the beautiful picture of the RSA. With a single light
source above, the towering perspective of a pair of Playfairs Greek Doric
columns and the matching pilasters beyond together frame a section of
acanthus frieze on the inner wall.

11
 Boldly, in his paintings of West Register House and St Stephens
Church (also by Playfair) Buchanan takes on one of the trickiest situations
for a painter of light, a scene lit both by artificial light and the radiance of
an evening sky. Magritte managed this subversively in paintings like Empire
of Light, but Buchanan acknowledges a less fashionable inspiration in the
work of American illustrator Maxfield Parrish. A brilliant technician, when
he wasnt painting fairies Parrish was a master of glowing evening skies
and multiple light sources.
In Buchanans Charlotte Square at Dusk [cat.31], the secondary light
source is muted, but the Albert Memorial nevertheless picks up a ghostly
light from the street. His painting of St Stephens Church though is a
masterly study of artificial light and of shadow, the half-tones beautifully
observed, all seen against a luminous evening sky. The composition is also
a remarkable achievement in perspective. The cavernous interior of the
illuminated arch and the dizzy perspective of the whole angled compo-
sition are a superb tribute to Playfairs idiosyncratic church. Inspired by
Hawksmoors city churches it is more baroque than neoclassical and in
this Buchanans composition does it justice. The dizzy spiral composition
of another painting, New Town Staircase [cat.23], looking up to a glow-
ing oval skylight suggests Borromini, who was in turn an inspiration to
Hawksmoor, but it also reveals how Buchanan himself is not averse to the
occasional vivid baroque flourish.
St Stephens Church also features in Chrome Louvres [cat.35], St Stephens
at Dusk [cat.33] and St Stephens Reflections [cat.34], two of several paintings
of buildings reflected in the shiny paintwork of parked cars. Buchanan
also paints Charlotte Square and Regent Bridge in the same bold way. Cars
are ubiquitous in the New Town though the streets of better run cities
like Florence or Amsterdam show it need not be so but they are simply
too alien ever to be, like the boats on Canalettos canals, just part of the
scene. That presents a problem to anyone who tries to paint the streets.
Buchanans pictures of buildings by artificial light cleverly avoid this
problem, but cars are so omnipresent that to ignore them altogether would
suggest defeat: that his paintings are nostalgic, regretting modernity. But
they are not. As he does with artificial light, in these pictures especially,
but also throughout his show, Buchanan accepts modernity and indeed
paints very modern pictures. You would never doubt that they belong
to the twenty first century. Bringing cars in as reflective devices is very
ingenious. It acknowledges their presence. It even incorporates them
into the scene, but doing so puts them firmly in their place. It also creates
opportunities for some very striking and very modern compositions,
however. So by his modernity, Hugh Buchanan demonstrates how, after
a quarter of a millennium, the Enlightenment ideals that drove the New
Town are as modern and as pertinent as they ever were, if indeed they are
not now even more urgent.

12
 [6]
playfair balcony, alva street
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

13
 [7]
playfair window
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

14
 [8]
playfair window, washed
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

15
 [9]
playfair window, distressed
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

16
 [ 10 ]
playfair window II
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

17
 [ 11 ]
Cadells Orange Blind
watercolour 154 x 76.2 cm

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (18831937) Interior: The Orange Blind

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

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19
 Hugh Buchanan and Northern Light
ada m wilk inson
Light is at the he a rt of architecture and how we perceive it. Inter-railing
around Europe in the first summer of my university years, I sought refuge from
the sweltering heat of the midday Sicilian sun in the shade of the Baroque
extravaganza that passes for the front of the cathedral in Syracuse, with its volute
scrolls that resembled giant Swiss rolls to my midday hunger. All that movement
provided shade from a sun high in the sky. Yet as I cooled down and ventured
around the corner, I noticed one of the giant, fluted and timeworn Doric columns
of the original Greek temple of Athena, which forms the basis of the cathedral,
protruding from the wall. With a couple of decades of reflection and sitting here
now in the city of Playfair, Adam and Hamilton, what brings those uneasy bedfel-
lows in Syracuse together in my mind, is not just that they are ultimately branches
of the same tradition, but that they are both reactions to light. They both rely
on the heavy shadow of that hot and high sun to create movement and depth in
a way that classical architecture in northern climes does not. Here, 56 degrees
north in Edinburgh, in contrast to their Greek, Roman and indeed Baroque pre-
decessors, the architects and masons well knew the power of the low sun at high
latitudes. Playfair, in his treatment of the Royal Scottish Academy, provides us
with perfect facsimiles of those ancient Greek columns in Syracuse, but with the
addition under the colonnade of an elaborate and deeply carved Anthemion frieze
which could only ever have been illuminated, in his day, by a low northern sun.
Furthermore, walk down Great King Street from east to west towards the end
of a bright, clear day in late winter and the silvery Craigleith sandstone is turned
golden, and the windows darkened by contrast, set just far enough back in their
reveals by their architects to produce the same rhythms on a horizontal plane
as sought by those unnamed craftsmen in the 5th century BC on a vertical one.
Hugh Buchanans manipulation of light through water and colour takes the
viewer back into the dreams and visions of that extraordinary group of architects,
produced by 18th and 19th century Edinburgh, as they cast their eyes across the
undeveloped ridge and gently falling northward slopes that were to become the
New Towns of Edinburgh. Too readily we forget that we live among the most
rigorous embodiment of the ideals of the European Enlightenment, the largest
group of high quality Neo-Classical buildings to be found anywhere in the world.
The excitement and creative energy of these architects minds is to be found in
the details that light picks out for us, with Hugh acting as editor-in-chief for our
untrained eyes. The usual medium of architecture lovers the photograph only
ever tells a small part of the story: no film or digital sensor has yet been created
that is as sensitive as the human eye, meaning that architectural photography is
mostly limited to day time images. Yet this exhibition reminds us that we see our
city as much in the darkness of winter as in the summer light, capturing those
glimpses of buildings that are hurried past on the way to catch a bus, rather than
admired during a brief pause in our busy, living classical city.

20
 [ 12 ]
the royal scottish academy study
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

21
 [ 13 ]
broughton street I
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

22
 [ 14 ]
broughton street II
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

23
 [ 15 ]
broughton street III
watercolour 76.2 x 56 cm

24
 [ 16 ]
broughton street IV
watercolour 76.2 x 56 cm

26
Hugh Buchanan, Edwin Smith & an earlier anniversary
i a n gow
Some v isitor s to Hugh Buchanans exhibition, celebrating the 250th
anniversary of Craigs competition-winning plan for the New Town of
Edinburgh and the start of building, may find the image of the handsome
Greek double Doric doorway at the head of Broughton Street, with its
repeating wreaths in the unifying frieze, hauntingly familiar. It is certainly
an archaeological quotation, demonstrating the scholarship of the New
Towns architects, but it had already caught the eye of an earlier artist, the
brilliant photographer Edwin Smith, when he undertook an equivalent
survey fifty years ago to celebrate the bi-centenary of the Craig plan.
Smiths photographic survey was commissioned by Edinburgh
University Press and taken specially to illustrate A. J. Youngsons The
Making of Classical Edinburgh, 1966, a ground-breaking analysis by this
celebrated economic historian to set the Craig Plan and its execution in
the context of the Enlightenment. Youngsons timely assessment of its
unique cultural significance profoundly influenced the measures that were
soon put in place to conserve the New Town following the Bicentenary
and kicked off by Sir Robert Matthews Assembly Rooms Conference,
where Youngson was one of the speakers in 1970, and the foundation of
the Edinburgh New Town Conservation Committee the following year.
If Edwin Smith (19121971) was the obvious choice for the Press, as the
most celebrated architectural photographer of his day and regarded by
Betjeman as a genius at photography with a long run of illustrated books
for Thames and Hudson, his response to Edinburgh, was deeply personal
and idiosyncratic creating a vision of the New Town as distinctive as

28
Atgets Paris the photographer he most revered. Thames and Hudsons
Scotland, 1955, included Smiths first photographs of Old Reekie in a
penumbral fug.
Although the first photographs in The Making of Classical Edinburgh
are devoted to the Old Town, with its high tenements rising from a fore-
ground of atmospheric ancient road-mending wagons, his New Town
photographs are seamless with the Old as year by year the once pristine
new buildings had absorbed the soot from a myriad of coal fires and the
railway tunnelled through its very heart to bond the two in a unifying
blackness giving many of his photographs, delighting in the variety of
viewpoints imparted by the underlying geology, the character of silhou-
ettes against the sky. Smiths initial training had been as an architect and
he had an affinity for the component stone of buildings, but even after
taking up photography he preferred to describe himself as an artist. He
clearly relished the gradations from the richest coal-face blackness of
Playfairs portico of the Royal Scottish Academy that faced his National
Gallery to the much subtler smoking imparted to the smooth individual
ashlar blocks of Ainslie Place from the harder Craigleith quarry beds and
the chiaroscuro imparted by the soot to the infinite varieties of droved
ashlar effects where the masons chisels created geometric textures, all
with distinctive now forgotten poetic names, revealed in slanting light
as in East Register Street captured by his lens and further dramatized by
the filigree shadows of cast ironwork across these scintillating facades.
The top notch monolithic columns of Adams Piranesian archway to Old
College are both admired and recorded with admiration. Oblique views
heighten the monumental scale the residents of the Modern Athens suc-
cessfully strove for in the interiors of the Signet Library and dramatize the

29
Hawksmorian idiosyncrasy of the soaring arch and buttressing scrolls in
an oblique view of the porch of Playfairs St Stephens Church. My favour-
ite photograph is an almost abstract study of light and shade on the sheer
masonry of a doorway in Elder Street tragically lost to make way for the
St James Centre.
Smiths cult of timeworn monochrome blackness did not appeal to the
early conservationists faced by daunting stonework repair bills and Smiths
survey thus also betrays the first stirrings of stone cleaning efforts that
began to reverse this timeworn unity to dramatic effect. The impossibility
of cleaning the Scott Monument without damaging its sculptural integrity
means that it happily survives as the outsize jet mourning jewel it has now
become in a lighter and brighter clean air enacted smokeless Edinburgh.
Paint and whitewash had been an earlier solution to the timeworn charac-
ter and Smiths photograph of the Broughton Street doorway is the only
record of its former whitewashing, increasing the dramatic contrast of his
image, but of which no trace remains today after its startlingly pristine
restoration nor of, to our eye, its outsize sign-written painted street num-
bers. We need artists of the calibre of Edwin Smith and Hugh Buchanan to
keep us keenly aware and alert to the unique intrinsic character that runs
through the New Town in a world of increasing uniformity and blandness.
Smith died of pancreatic cancer, at the height of his powers, just a few
years after his Edinburgh series was published, in 1971: his widow Olive
Cook bequeathed his negatives to the RIBA in 2002 as his memorial.

Reference: Robert Elwall, Evocations of Place: The photography of

Edwin Smith, 2007, London (RIBA Trust)

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 [ 17 ]
the royal scottish academy
watercolour 152.4 x 101.6 cm
 [ 18 ]
at the dentist
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

32
 [ 19 ]
west register house
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

33
 [ 20 ]
bute house interior
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

34
 [ 21 ]
charlotte square interior with chair I
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

36
 [ 22 ]
raeburn, charlotte square
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

37
38
 [ 23 ]
new town staircase
watercolour 56 x 38 cm detail opposite

39
 [ 24 ]
st bernards crescent interior I
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

40
42
 [ 25 ]
the svres vase
watercolour 56 x 38 cm detail opposite

43
 [ 26 ]
st bernards crescent interior II
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

44
 Hugh Buchanans Nighttown
peter davidson
Sta n ding on the brow of the hill and looking north as the light
begins to go, standing at the corner of Dundas Street and Queen Street, or of
Broughton Street and Forth Street, the handsome, familiar streets of the New
Town grow dim as the first mist comes up from the river. The white street-
lights mounted on the railings flicker into life, illuminating the smoothed or
channelled blocks of Craigleith stone. Now would be the time to walk along
the slope of the hill, from street to square as the lamps come on, flagstone
and cobble underfoot, the curtains not yet drawn, the shutters still open in
the wonderful rooms. Glimpses of moulded ceilings and chandeliers, gilded
frames and painted canvas in the first floor drawing-rooms behind the long
windows. Breakfront bookcases, busts on their cornices. Panelled walls, walls
painted in red, coral, muted green. Sometimes there are private worlds behind
the astragals, mysteries of the evening city: the second floor flat in Forth Street
which seems always to be lit by candlelight. These are the twilight fascinations
which occupied the fictional Edwardian detectives the sense that an endless
variety of life, benign or sinister, inhabited the constellations of lit windows
which makes up the city.
In this collection of pictures, however, it is as though an evening walk
has taken a wrong turning, leading to an alternative, troubled version of the
city, in which the familiar has grown strange and disquieting. There are few
unshuttered windows here: all blinds are drawn against the observing eye,
the viewpoints are unstable, unsettling. Harsh floodlighting, like lightning
flashes, flattens the grandeurs of the public buildings, reduces the gallant
statues to cut-outs. A cold white light, colder than streetlight or moonlight,
sharpens the architectural details. Even the interior pictures are lit by hos-
tile, bouncing sunlight, causing the blinds to be lowered against a daylight so
sharp as to take on some of the quality of the white streetlights, of freezing
moonlight. In this light, the contents of the fine rooms become wraiths, the
bleached-out ghosts of themselves.
Even the ingenious allusion to Cadells Orange Blind, about which Duncan
Macmillan writes so beautifully in his essay in this catalogue, carries disturb-
ing implications with it. As in so many pictures in this collection, the spectator
is shut out, left to wait on a threshold, unable to know what is on the other
side of a drawn blind or black-shadowed doorway. Is time consistent on both
sides of the window? Or is it still the late 1920s on the other side? Since the
blind is drawn down completely, we never see the artists rooms behind it the
magical rooms taking their colours from the Ballets Russes: the glimmering
chandelier, the black dado, the lavender walls, the turquoise sofa with the
scarlet cloak thrown down upon it. The more that these paintings of drawn
blinds are considered, the stranger they become: the first floor windows are
not seen from the street below, but straight on, as though the viewer was

46
seeing them from the window opposite, as though the viewer was stalking
and spying from a rented apartment, meaning no good to the inhabitants of
the rooms on the other side of the street.
A similar unsettled viewpoint surveys the series of neo-classical doorways
and gateways seen in moonlight or streetlight. In all of these the viewpoint is
subverted an old stratagem of Piranesis, but an excellent one the Broughton
Street doorways are seen almost from above, as though the shallow slope of
the daytime street has become a precipice in the darkness. The steps up to Old
College with its monolithic columns, whether seen by car lights or by a harsh,
unnatural moonlight, are viewed from above the level of the architectural
plinth, from an angle unreachable by any spectator save in a dream. Darkness
gathers and deepens in doorways the street gate of the High School is turned
into the threshold of a secretive, forbidding palace that only exists by night.
The lit cavern of the doorway of St Stephens church is overwhelming, even
though the last light of a spring day is fading in the sky behind its tower. These
stark decorations almost like finished schemes for spectral wall paintings
recall a Scottish precursor of Piranesi the painter William Gow Ferguson,
who worked at the end of the seventeenth century (if the painter of the still
lives is indeed the same artist who painted haunted ancient detritus seen in
stormy moonlight) and who painted the strangely lit and menacing decorative
panels Medea casting spells amongst broken sculpture now at Ham House and in
Worcester College, Oxford. But who would have the fortitude to live in such
a room painted with ruins and shifting perspectives?
Time has passed, and the subjects of these intensely inventive pictures are
less mellowed than abraded. This is expressed in the very texture of the paint-
ings themselves: on several most notably on the representation of Playfairs
blind stone window with its unreachable cast iron balconette, itself a ghost
of a window the surface of the paper is textured and shaded in such a way
as to suggest wear, damage, fading. Time has not passed smoothly in these
pictures, nor do they anticipate an easy future. They may be marking a quarter
millennium since the first development began in Edinburgh north of the loch
and on the slopes down towards the river, but their mood is one of disquiet as
much as of celebration. The familiar place has become strange, unknowable
at nightfall. The ideals of the Enlightenment, as Duncan Macmillan most
justly reminds us, have never been more important than they are now, but
they have a dwindling number of adherents in this present time. Indeed the
presiding spirit guiding Buchanans views in the darkened streets, belongs not
to the Enlightenment but to the turn of the twentieth century the elegant,
barnstorming, despairing figure of James Pryde failed prizefighter, extreme
bohemian, and superlative, prophetic painter of grand buildings turned spec-
tral in the streets of Nighttown.

47
 [ 27 ]
tail lights, south bridge
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

[ 28 ]
old college steps II
watercolour 152.4 x 101.6 cm

48
50
 [ 29 ]
surgeons hall
watercolour 56 x 76.2 cm
52
 [ 30 ]
dundas house
watercolour 56 x 76.2 cm
detail opposite

53
 [ 31 ]
charlotte square at dusk
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

54
 [ 32 ]
the dean institute by night
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

55
 [ 33 ]
st Stephens at dusk
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

56
 [ 34 ]
st Stephens reflectionS
watercolour 56 x 38 cm

57
 [ 35 ]
chrome louvres, st Stephens
watercolour 38 x 56 cm

59
 [ 36 ]
charlotte square reflections
watercolour 43 x 63.5 cm

61
 [ 37 ]
rear window, charlotte square
watercolour 43 x 63.5 cm

63
 [ 38 ]
regent bridge reflections
watercolour 38 x 56 cm

65
 [ 39 ]
blue bmw, charlotte square
watercolour 38 x 56 cm

67
68
 About the Artist

HUGH BUCH ANAN was born in Edinburgh in 1958. The city instilled
in him a love of architecture which he developed as a student of Drawing
and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art. After graduating in 1981 he
worked on commissions for the National Trust and in 1987 was invited by
the Prince of Wales to paint a series of interiors of Balmoral, subsequently
completing a further sequence at Highgrove in 1994. In 1988 he was com-
missioned by the House of Commons to paint four interiors of the Palace
of Westminster.
Hugh Buchanans paintings are also in the collections of the Victoria
and Albert Museum, Edinburgh City Art Centre, the University of Edin
burgh, the University of Aberdeen, the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank
of Scotland, Flemings Bank, Deutsche Bank, the National Trust for
Scotland and the English National Trust. In 2002 he was commissioned
by the House of Lords to paint the lying in state of the Queen Mother
at the Palace of Westminster. In 1987 he was one of ten British water-
colourists shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, Spain. In 1991
he exhibited at the Lincoln Center, New York. In 1994 he was given a
retrospective by the National Trust at Petworth House. In 1998 five works
by Hugh Buchanan were included in the exhibition Princes as Patrons: The
Art Collections of the Princes of Wales from the Renaissance to the Present Day
shown at the National Museum and Gallery, Cardiff. In 2005 his paintings
featured in Watercolours and Drawings from the Collection of Queen Elizabeth
the Queen Mother, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh and Queens
Gallery, London.
Hugh Buchanans work has featured in two limited edition publica-
tions with accompanying texts by Peter Davidson: The Eloquence of Shadows
(1994) and Winter Light (2010). In 2009 his exhibition of library paintings,
Enlightenment, was shown at The Old Town House, University of Aberdeen.
In 2013 he was invited to show a selection of library and archive paintings
at the Historical Fiction Festival, Summerhall, Edinburgh where his exhi-
bition The Esterhazy Archive was also held. In the same year he was invited
by the National Library of Scotland to paint a series of compositions of
The John Murray Archive which were exhibited at the National Library
in 2015. His painting of Patrick Leigh Fermors passports was presented
to the National Library in 2016.
This is Hugh Buchanans fourth exhibition at The Scottish Gallery.

Hugh Buchanan would like to thank the contributors to this publication: Duncan
Macmillan, Adam Wilkinson, Ian Gow and Peter Davidson; the Office of the First
Minister of Scotland; William Mowat Thomson; and Willie Gray Muir.

69
70
 From the Sponsor

R et tie & Co. are the leading independent firm of property specialists
in Scotland. We are delighted to sponsor this exhibition to celebrate 25
years of Rettie & Co. and 250 years of Edinburghs New Town. As well as
being of international architectural significance it still remains, after all
these years, a perfect city. From our head office in Wemyss Place we know
better than anyone that the New Town is a harmonious and congenial place
in which to live and work, and a model for urban living which has yet to
be improved upon.

www.rettie.co.uk Head office telephone 0131 220 4160

opposite: St Bernards Crescent Interior II, detail of cat.26

71
The Contributors
dunc a n m acmill a n is Professor Emeritus of the History of
Scottish Art and former Curator of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Art
critic of The Scotsman he is also the author of Painting in Scotland:
the Golden Age (1986), Scottish Art in the 20th Century (1994) and
Scottish Art 14602000 (2000). He has written several monographs
on Scottish and European artists including F.C.B. Cadell, Stephen
Campbell and Elizabeth Blackadder.
a da m w ilk inson has held the post of Director of Edinburgh
World Heritage since 2008, returning to Scotland to answer the
siren call of Edinburgh. He led the influential campaign group SAV E
Britains Heritage (20018) and works to support colleagues across
the globe in the management of their complex historic cities.
I a n G ow was born in Edinburgh and educated at George Heriots
School and Trinity College, Cambridge. After many years in the
National Monuments Record of Scotland, he was appointed Curator
of the National Trust for Scotland in 1998 where he is now Chief
Curator Emeritus. He was written several books and many articles
on the decorative arts and architecture of Scotland.
Peter Dav idson is a fellow of Campion Hall, University of
Oxford. His cultural history of twilight The Last of the Light was
published in 2015, his book of essays on northern places Distance and
Memory in 2013, and his influential study The Idea of North in 2005.
He has collaborated twice on artists books with Hugh Buchanan:
Winter Light in 2010 and The Eloquence of Shadows in 1994.

16 Dundas Street Edinburgh EH3 6HZ

Telephone +44 (0) 131 558 1200
Emailmail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
Gallery hours: Monday to Friday 106pm
and Saturday 104pm
Published by The Scottish Gallery for the exhibition Hugh Buchanan:
New Town held at 16 Dundas Street from 7 June to 1 July 2017
ISBN 978 1 910267 60 8
Artworks Hugh Buchanan 2017
Text The contributors 2017
Catalogue The Scottish Gallery 2017
All rights reserved
Works photographed by John McKenzie
Portrait and studio photography by Stephen Dunn
Designed and typeset in ATF Garamond by Dalrymple
Printed in Scotland by J. Thomson Colour Printers
Front cover: detail from Cadells Orange Blind [cat.11]
Back cover: detail from The Svres Vase [cat.25]