{"id":91,"date":"2014-07-08T12:34:58","date_gmt":"2014-07-08T12:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/eca-principal\/?p=91"},"modified":"2016-03-18T15:49:44","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T15:49:44","slug":"scottish-colourists-and-miss-jean-brodie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/eca-principal\/scottish-colourists-and-miss-jean-brodie\/","title":{"rendered":"Scottish Colourists and Miss Jean Brodie"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"People<\/a>

“People and Sails” by JD Fergusson. Artwork in the public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

I read two interesting articles in this weekend\u2019s newspapers: in the Financial Times there was a review of the exhibition of JD Fergusson\u2019s paintings at Chichester\u2019s fantastic Pallant House Gallery, and in the Guardian there was a recollection by Penelope Jardine of her life in Italy with novelist Muriel Spark, written to coincide with a new collection of essays by Spark (The Golden Fleece), edited by Jardine. Reading these in tandem, in an Edinburgh made even more beautiful than usual by uncharacteristic unbroken sunshine, brought home to me the very particular character of a city that I have only called home for three years, but which is increasingly opening up its reticent personality to me in the manner of a slowly developing friendship.<\/p>\n

When I first arrived in town, the lush paintings of the colourists and Spark\u2019s celebrated anti-heroine Jean Brodie had provided a rather lazy shorthand for me, useful for articulating the positive and negative reputation which the city carries before it. The combination of a sort of \u2018douce\u2019 (to use a local term) Southside complacency and a sharp sense of cultural superiority were the traits that pretty pictures of New Town drawing room still-lives, and quaint rallies to the \u2018cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me\u2019 by a Morningside School teacher fascinated by fascism, suggested to my mind whenever Edinburgh\u2019s artistic and literary legacy were raised in conversation.<\/p>\n

Jackie Wullschlager rightly contests any sense of cosy parochialism in her assessment of Fergusson\u2019s work: \u2018 \u201cEcossais\u201d, Fergusson always insisted on writing after his name at exhibitions in Paris, where he made his home from 1907. Scottishness defined his identity in pre-war Montparnasse bohemia: \u201ca solid, sandy, steady-eyed Scotchman\u201d, observed American novelist Theodore Dreiser. Yet transpose Fergusson from Edinburgh \u2013 where this exhibition began – to the breezy south coast and the Scottish strain fades. Barely known works unearthed from private collections here place Fergusson in an avant-garde Parisian milieu in ways unmatched by any of the other colourists.\u2019 Similarly Jardine debunks the status of Brodie as a champion for Edinburgh\u2019s petit-bourgeois pretentions: \u2018she gets sick of people \u201cgoing on and on\u201d about Brodie, the teacher\u2026 from the novel that Spark based on her own years at James Gillespie\u2019s High School for Girls: \u201cMuriel used to say it was her milch cow, like Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles was to Hardy.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a boy born and bred in England\u2019s west country, Tess is another middle-brow story with great resonance that brings place, past and personality into close alignment for me. But I\u2019m wary of joining the debunkers just yet. As the sun throws its clear light across the Forth to Arthur\u2019s Seat and bathes my study in a dappled glow I am loathe to let go of comforting local narratives.<\/p>\n

Related links:<\/strong><\/p>\n