During the Great War Lavery was commissioned as a war artist. Several of his war paintings are on display at the Lavery on Location Exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery.

Mine-Laying Submarines Harwich 1917:-

Hendon 1917. Hendon was a Royal Flying Corps training base. I really liked this as I’m a sucker for biplanes:-

More sombrely this is The Cemetery, Étaples:-

Daylight Raid from my Studio:-

A Coast Defence. An 18-Pounder Anti-Aircraft Gun, Tyneside:-

Lavery was almost alone in portraying those who became casualties. Wounded, London:-

More of Lavery’s works can be seen on the Ulster Museum’s website, here.

Lavery made his name when he was commissioned to paint the State Visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition 1888. For this he had individual sittings for the privileged invitees so that he could then incorporate accurate portarits of them into his final composition.

He painted many pictures of the International Exhibition including this one of the main building. Along with many other depictions of various International or National Exhibitions, plus the Festival of Britain, I have a copy of this hanging on my study wall:-

Lavery also painted A View from the Canal, Kelvingrove, showing one of the gondolas which plied the waters of the River Kelvin as an amusement attraction:-

And this one of the exhibit The Blue Hungarians:-

One of the features of the international Exhibition was an array of restaurants and café including The Dutch Cocoa House (as depicted by Lavery below) which dispensed Van Houten products.

The above for some reason reminds me of both Edwin Hopper’s Nighthawks and Edgar Degas’s The Absinthe Drinker.

Lavery exhibited this painting in the Art Gallery at the International Exhibition. Dawn after the Battle of Langside. Mary, Queen of Scots in the aftermath of the battle:-

For some reason the title the Scottish National Gallery has given to its exhibition featuring the painter John Lavery is “An Irish Impressionist.”

I had always considered Lavery to be a Scottish painter, even if he was born in Ireland. He moved to Scotland as a child and started his career in Glasgow.

The Exhibition is on till 27^th October.

Lavery’s early work resembles paintings by The Glasgow Boys. This is The Intruders, very reminiscent of a painting by James Guthrie:-

His style soon developed as he took to painting more impressionistic works such as these two of the Bridge at Grès (Grez-sur-Loing):-

Then we have Windy Day:-

and The Harbour of St Jean de Luz:-

There are two versions of On The Loing in the exhibition. This one was a study for the larger painting exhibited beside it.

The current Exhibition at Modern One, Edinburgh, is Tracing Time by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh, of whom I hadn’t heard until the exhibition came on. It ws quite interesting, though some of the exhibits were a bit of a miss rather than a hit.

The outline of this reminded me of the shape of the Korean peninsula:-

A fairly crude drawing of an odd subject:-

Circles or swirls feature in a lot of the exhibits:-

A somewhat scatological drawing:-

This seems to be just a shape:-

Houses, too, are a feature:-

This walk-thorough installation recreates the entrances to several of the homes in which the artist has lived:-

The Exhibition is on till Sep 1st.

This exhibition, exploring 250 years of Scottish landscape is on until the 2nd of June 2024 at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh. We visited in mid February.

These four are a sample of what you can see.

Threatening Storm by William Gillies:-

A Late Snowfall, Galloway, by Charles Oppenheimer:-

A corrie in Argyllshire, by James Lawton Wingate:-

A street in Temple by William Gillies:-

In March we dropped into the V&A, Dundee for something to do.

We came across a small exhibition of postcards by Valentine’s, once a Dundee institution.

According to the V&A site this exhibition was supposed to end in January 2023!

I have many Valentine’s postcards in my collection especially those of the 1938 Empire Exhibition.

I had not realised, though, that Valentine’s themselves had constructed for them an Art Deco building on Dundee’s Kingsway, as these two postcards from the V&A Exhibition attest. The building is now long gone:-

Also on display was this postcard of Portobello Bathing Pool:-

Images of Portobello Bathing Pool in its heyday are here.

The V&A, Dundee, is holding an Exhibition about tartan. It goes on until Jan 2024. It’s worth seeing.

We visited it in August (and again with our eldest son, his wife and daughter, in September.)

One of the exhibits is the oldest piece of tartan known:-

There are many examples of tartan being used for promotional or decorative purposes:-

These can go back a long time:-

However I did not expect to see a NATO tartan nor one commemorating the SALT Treaty:-

Tartan is not an exclusively Scottish style. Below is a Burmese one:-

Beside that  was a Masai one:-

Madras tartans were once thought to have been inspired by Scots but they are in fact indigenous to India:-

Tartans from Balmoral testify to Queen Victoria’s enthusiasm for Scottish culture:-

Modern takes on tartan. (There’s a Dundee FC strip in the background here):-

A couple of weeks ago myself and the good lady went to the Grayson Perry Exhibition at the National Gallery in Edinburgh. It’s called Smash Hits.

I wasn’t expecting much as what I’ve seen of his work on television didn’t inspire me. However we are Friends of the National Galleries and that has various benefits – among them a discount in their cafés  (the one in Modern Two is excellent) and free entry to exhibitions such as this. (I would not have paid the entrance fee of £19.)

I had known Perry made his name as a potter and has an alter ego as Claire whom I find tiresome in the extreme.

I was, though, pleasantly surprised to see in the first gallery two sculptures which to me had a Japanese look.

Our Father and Our Mother. Clicking on the links should take you to my photos of the blurb accompanying each:-

The next gallery had a series of tapestries collectively titled The Vanity of Small Differences and based on Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress but updated for the Twenty-First century:-

Note the cafetiere and “literature” mugs in the second one above. Apparently these are emblems of being middle class. I admit to using a cafetiere. I don’t have literature mugs though.

The background in the last one seemed to me to sum up life in Britain in latter years:-

Another huge tapestry illustrated Perry’s lack of originality. It’s titled Morris, Gainsborough, Turner, Riley:-

His “Battle of Britain” ended up as a conscious channelling of Paul Nash. It’s quite effective though:-

Vale of Leven lad Lachie Stewart won a gold medal in the 10,000 metres at the first Edinburgh Commonwealth Games in 1970.  Over the years since he has built a succession of ship models. Some of these were on display on the Maid of the Loch when we visited last September.

Exhibition poster:-

Lachie on the track:-

Lachie’s ship models posters:-

Lachie (centre) in conversation:-

Despite its (for the time) Hi-Tech modernistic architecture, the Empire Exhibition, Scotland, 1938, was home to a very traditional type of building, that of the turf-roofed dwellings of the clachans of Highland Scotland. I featured a postcard contrasting the new with the old – the Tower of Empire overlooking Highland village cottages – here.

Clachan is Gaelic for a small settlement. A previous such village had been one of the hits of the Scottish National Exhibition held in Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow, in 1911 and the population of Glasgow was keen to see such an exhibit revived.

Three of Brian Gerald’s art-drawn postcards of the 1938 Exhibition focused solely on the Clachan. As well as cottages the Clachan featured a ruined castle, a loch, with a lovely stone bridge over a burn running into it, and the occasional bagpiper strolling about:-

One of the cottages did double duty as the Exhibition’s Post Office:-