Hugh Buchanan John Murray Catalogue

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Hugh Buchanan paints the John Murray Archive Austen, Byron, Conan Doyle, Etc ...

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Hugh Buchanan paints the John Murray ArchiveAusten, Byron, Conan Doyle, Etc ...

Transcript of Hugh Buchanan John Murray Catalogue

Page 1: Hugh Buchanan John Murray Catalogue

Hugh Buchanan paints the John Murray ArchiveAusten, Byron, Conan Doyle, Etc ...

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National Library of ScotlandGeorge IV Bridge · Edinburgh EH1 1EW26 June – 6 September 2015

John Martin Gallery38 Albemarle Street · London W1S 4JG18 September – 10 October 2015

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Hugh Buchanan paints the John Murray ArchiveAusten, Byron, Conan Doyle, Etc ...

John Martin Gallery · 2015

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As a first year graphics student at Edinburgh Art College in the 1970’s I would often spend my lunch breaks wandering aim­lessly around the second hand bookshops of the Grassmarket, buying the odd tattered volume here and there, never even dreaming that thirty years later I would be working with similar but rather more important material in the National Library five hundred yards away at the top of the hill. In sec­ond year I dropped out of the Illustration course and switched to Drawing and Painting. From then on I put my bibliophilia to one side and concentrated on watercolours of architectural interiors, particularly the play of light across rooms.

In 2008 in search of new subject matter I was drawn back to the world of books and exhibited a series of paintings of librar­ies. However, a critic pointed out in a review, that the spines of endless rows of books were, after a while, rather boring. So I asked myself what it was about books that really did interest me and I came to the conclusion that it was the paper itself, especially when torn or stained, crumpled, brittle or greasy. Archives in other words. Add some glistening wax seals and maybe a cobwebbed vault to the mix and I found that I had endless scope, not only for evoking the pathos of age, which has always interested me, but also some aspects of the lives of the people that created all those painstakingly transcribed documents, be they great novels, ordinary letters, title deeds or simple rental agreements.

My search for the archives that lived in my imagination – those in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose – led me from Drumlanrig in Dumfriess­shire, (the finest in situ archive in Scotland), to Forchtenstein, the Esterhazy stronghold south of Vienna. Stretching to

twenty five miles of shelving, this is probably the largest pri­vate archive in Europe. It was work from this last project that was shown at Summerhall in Edinburgh in 2013 as part of the Historical Fiction Festival.

Later that summer I was sitting by the edge of a lake in Berlin, where I had gone to paint porcelain, when I received an email from David McClay of the National Library of Scotland. ‘Why don’t you come and paint a proper archive?’ he asked; ‘You’ve heard of John Murray’s I’m sure?’ And so began one of the most fascinating years of my life. Every week we would take two authors – Austen and Byron, Leigh Fermor and Lancaster, Scott and Hogg, Washington Irving and Isabella Bird, Darwin and Livingstone … and attempt to assemble com­positions from their incunabula – letters, maps, passports etc. Some were easy and some defeated us. Often we would have to back track, as better ideas occurred to us. The process of composition alone took six months.

Bringing paint into the strong room was obviously out of the question. Nor was this a cobwebbed vault, but a modern room filled with dexion shelving and humming with neon. But what we were able to do, by turning the overhead lights off, and with the aid of low, hand held lamps, was to replicate the effects of raking sunlight – illuminating every crease fold and wrinkle in the documents. By laying them on different coloured papers we were also able to evoke some kind of mood for the camera.

It had not originally been my intention to include images of the authors or their principal characters, but, having started on the Leigh Fermor passports, I saw that it added a clarity and vigour to the compositions. Not only that, but dialogues

Preface An Artist in the ArchiveForeword The John Murray Archive

The John Murray Archive was transferred from 5o Albemarle Street (where the Murrays lived from 1812) to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh in 2006. It is made up of over 150,000 manuscript letters as well as manuscripts of the works of Byron, Walter Scott, Livingstone and many others. It is much more than just a collection of authors’ writings; it is a complete publisher’s archive that includes ledgers, account books and letter books. It spans one of the most exciting and complex periods in our country’s history, a time of innumer­able pioneering discoveries in science, medicine, exploration and archaeology. By the end of the nineteenth century the world was almost unrecognisable from what it had been at the beginning. And the Murrays were at the forefront of most of the developments. They published many of the key books of the period – Jane Austen’s Emma and Persuasion, Byron’s Childe Harold, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels to mention just a few. Murray also launched the Quarterly Review in 1809, with the help of Walter Scott and George Canning, as a Tory counterblast to the Whig Edinburgh Review. It became the leading literary and politi­cal quarterly of the century, and brought people of power and influence into the Murray circle.JoHn R. MuRRay

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With the John Murray Archive the National Library of Scot­land can boast of having one of the world’s largest and most important literary archives. It was perhaps inevitable there­fore that Hugh Buchanan, an artist renowned for his work in archives and libraries, would eventually find himself immersed in that remarkable collection.

Having admired Hugh’s paintings for a number of years I was delighted to have the opportunity to introduce him to the history and archives of John Murray and now to see the impressive results of his engagement with the collection; nineteen captivating watercolours, representing nine Murray authors. Whilst most of the names of these literary greats will be well known, the name and connection with John Murray will, perhaps, be less so.

The publishing house of John Murray was founded in London’s Fleet Street by the Scotsman John McMurray. He had been advised to drop what one friend described as the ‘wild highland Mac’ from his name in deference to the strong anti­Scottish feeling in the city at that time. However, the Murray family maintained their strong Scottish connections throughout successive generations, so much so that when the current John Murray, seventh of that illustrious name, decided to bring 234 years of business independence to an end it was to the National Library of Scotland that their unparalleled pub­lishing archives eventually came.

Whilst the lasting legacy of the long history of Murray pub­lishing is principally in the books and journals they produced, it is also to be found in the archives which they created, col­lected and preserved. Numbering perhaps a million separate items of correspondence, business, financial and literary papers

the size of the collection can be overwhelming. However, it is the quality of the archive which is truly striking. As well as providing insight into the creative and writing process through original drafts, rewrites and proofs of works, there is forensic detail on each book’s sales and reception. Sometimes this is a story of unparalleled success, at other times of disappointing failure. Whatever the story it is one worth discovering. The lively correspondence between publisher and author can range from fraught, celebratory, gossiping and poignant as the lives of the authors are as often as not the topics of discussion as their literary endeavours.

Growing success led John Murray II in 1812 to transfer his business from London’s Fleet Street to the more fashionable Albemarle Street. There he established the most glittering lit­erary circle where scientists and politicians could mingle with explorers and poets. It was here for example in 1814 that Lord Byron and Walter Scott, the two most popular writers of the day, first met. It was in that same room years later that Murray was involved in one of the most notorious of literary crimes: the burning of Byron’s memoirs, thought by Murray’s literary advisor William Gifford to be ‘fit only for a brothel and would damn Lord Byron to certain infamy if published.’

However, the Murray family made amends for this destruc­tion by putting together over the generations the greatest single collection of Byron letters, manuscripts and archives. So, alongside Byron’s invaluable literary manuscripts and proofs may be found his bills, medical reports and other curious doc­uments, for example a fallen French soldier’s livret or papers, collected by Byron from the battlefield of Waterloo. The Byron papers also include thousands of letters to and from Byron.

Introduction Byron’s Toothbrush and Other Stories

began to open up between the portrait images and the docu­ments themselves. Raeburn’s portrait of Scott is the basis of the engraving on the Bank of Scotland ten pound note. So the postcard of Raeburn’s portrait that I used in the Childe Harold composition should be identical; and yet, when it came to painting the banknote and the postcard I subconsciously interpreted Scott’s image in different ways. When placed with the cheques – coincident with his bankruptcy – he appears to be pleading and mournful – while in my depiction of him with his correspondence with Byron he appears complacent and defiant.

Through working with the John Murray Archive I have learned so much about the humanity of the authors, from the way Paddy Leigh Fermor carelessly repaired his maps with photocopies and sellotape, to the messages hidden within the mottos of the Ettrick Shepherd’s incongruously elaborate wax seals. Then there is Byron’s handwriting – the surpris­ingly pedantic curlicues on the envelopes contrasting with the drunken scrawl within. And lastly there are Jane Austen’s cheques, written out by Murray to her brother after her early death. They have an ineffably plangent quality that, along with so much in this priceless collection, informs us on a level that biography can rarely reach,HuGH bucHanan

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These include his letters to Murray which range from furious reactions to editorial interference to long shopping lists, like the one from Italy in which he requested books, toothbrushes, tooth­powders and ‘I want besides a Bulldog – a terrier – and two Newfoundland dogs.’ The Murray relationships with their authors were seldom restricted to publishing matters alone.

The glamour of the Romantic period when Murray was publishing the literary works of Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, James Hogg and Washington Irving, gave way as the nineteenth century progressed to more works of science and travel. Murray was responsible for important and best­selling works of scientist Charles Darwin and explorer David Livingstone. However, such interesting authors, whilst con­sidered by Hugh, were ultimately passed over. The challenge for Hugh was not, I think, in finding interesting people or materials in the John Murray Archive but in trying to limit his options. With perhaps a million separate archive items, cov­ering thousands of authors, some of whom are the greatest in their genres, the challenge over the six months of his regular visits to the archive was to find a combination of interesting authors, stories and especially book and archive items. In each of his watercolours Hugh has achieved just that. This is equally so for authors of the twentieth as well as the nineteenth cen­tury. The famous literary circle of the Romantic period had its twentieth century manifestation when some of the great­est travel writers of the day, including Patrick Leigh Fermor, would meet the likes of Osbert Lancaster, who after dashing off his latest cartoon for The Daily Express, would regularly make his way to Murrays for the pleasure of stimulating and convivial company.

The John Murray Archive, thanks to the generosity of the John R. Murray Charitable Trust, has been able to expand the

archive collection to include not only the publishing papers of their authors but many of the personal archives too, includ­ing thousands of Lancaster’s cartoons and the entire personal archive of Leigh Fermor. Other authors, like the intrepid Victorian traveller Isabella Bird, left Murray, not only her pub­lisher but one of her dearest friends, her papers including her letters to her beloved sister and her remarkable photographs from her global travels.

Even authors who began their literary careers with one pub­lisher often found themselves becoming Murray authors. The hugely prolific Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one such, who after Murray’s acquisition of Smith, Elder & Co., became one of Murray’s bestselling authors, especially with his editions of the gripping Sherlock Holmes stories.

The National Library of Scotland is keen to encourage as much use of the John Murray Archive collection as possible, be that with researchers in our reading rooms or through exhibitions and displays. Whilst the archive can provide an unparalleled store of information and insight into the lives, personalities and writings of authors and their readers, there is another often overlooked aspect of these archives; their beauty and interest as objects. Elegant or indecipherable handwrit­ing, handmade papers, leather bindings, gilded lettering, postal marks and wax seals, all add to the visual variety and appeal of an archive. With the exhibition of these watercolours alongside some of the original manuscripts and books from the collec­tion people have a unique opportunity to see some remarkable literary treasures examined through the special creative and artistic talents of Hugh Buchanan.DaVID McclayCurator of the John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland

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1 · MuRRay at HIS lEDGERwatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

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2 · JanE auStEn cHEquE StuDywatercolour on paper · 11 x 15 inches

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Though Jane Austen had dealings with several publishers, the John Murray Archive allows us a unique perspective on her brief career as a novelist. In the Murray account books and in correspondence with his talent scout and journal editor, William Gifford, we discover precious evidence for her early esteem and track details for the economic fortunes of a writer who was not averse to admitting that she wrote for money as well as fame: ‘tho’ I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward [her brother] calls Pewter too’ (30 November 1814, to her niece Fanny Knight).

Jane Austen was a published author for just seven years of her short life – from 1811 to 1817 – and engaged with John Murray II by autumn 1815. Murray brought out Emma and a second edition of Mansfield Park (both in 1816), and two short nov­els, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, issued together in 1818 within months of Austen’s death. He was not noted as a novel publisher; most of the novel manuscripts offered to the firm (including that of Frankenstein) were rejected. Emma is his first novel by an English woman writer; yet he was among the most fashionable publishers of his day, cultivating influential connec­tions and establishing his imprint as a leading literary brand.

In some ways, John Murray and Jane Austen were on sim­ilar trajectories in the 1810s. She was forging a reputation as a new kind of fiction writer, almost counter­novelistic in the illusion of reality she created, while he was in the vanguard of a new breed of publisher. Emma issued in three volumes for a guinea, with a dedication to the Prince Regent, and a promo­tional review by Walter Scott in Murray’s own periodical the Quarterly Review gave Jane Austen’s career a major hike and the critical seal of approval to a serious talent.

Jane AustenKatHRyn SutHERlanD

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3 · JanE auStEn anD EMMawatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

4 · JanE auStEn cHEquEwatercolour on paper · 22 x 30 inches

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5 · byRon SEal StuDywatercolour on paper · 11 x 15 inches

Lord Byron RobIn, 13tH baRon byRon

Byron was not known for his love of artists or art galleries. There is therefore a certain irony – one which Byron would surely have appreciated – in the fact that, perhaps more than any other of the Romantic Poets, Byron has always inspired artists.

His love of climes warmer than his chilly homeland – ‘give me a sun, I care not how hot …’; his musings on the iconic sights of Italy and Greece; his wandering and revolutionary spirit; above all the drama of his own life and his passionate response to the people and places he visited have provided limitless scope for artists to create their own visual interpre­tations of his work. In France, Delacroix found inspiration in Byron for the exotic and emotional themes of his creations, while in England it is Turner’s images which are most associ­ated with Byron’s poetry; impossible to read Byron’s lines on ‘Sounion’ or ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ without Turner’s paintings coming to mind.

Hugh Buchanan has created very different images with which to conjure up the spirit of Byron. Drawing on the Murray Archive from the National Library of Scotland, his evocative water colours give an almost physical experience of the texture of the manuscripts and the smell of the sealing wax. I particularly like the detailed image of Byron’s seal with the letter ‘b’ and the coronet imprinted deeply in the red wax; you sense the moment when Byron has finished an amusing scribble to a close friend and plunges his seal into the hot wax before sending the letter on its way. To bring us such proximity to Byron is a fine achievement.

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6 · byRon SEalwatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

Lord Byron turned twenty­four in 1812, the year in which the publication of Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage transformed a mocking newcomer (Byron’s 1809 satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, had caused sparks to fly on both sides of the border) into a poet of international stature. A poem that promoted the image of the romantic loner (‘Apart he stalked in joyless reverie, And from his native land resolved to go’) turned its handsome author – addressed by an ecstatic Lady Caroline Lamb as if Byron himself was the gloom­soaked Childe – into the darling of society.

Poetry is notoriously prophetic. In 1812, Byron could not know that his own exile was only four years away; that his flight from scandal, debt and a disastrous marriage would resolve itself into a permanent absence that ended with his doomed journey to Greece where, aged thirty­six, he died.

That sense of exile – in flight, as it were, from his own self – haunts the marvellous series of paintings in which Hugh Buchanan delicately collates elements of Byron’s literary life abroad in a way that is wonderfully suggestive both of his pas­sion (blood­red wax spatters the letter lying beneath one of two representations of Byron’s splendid, coroneted seals) and of the poet’s exasperating, fascinatingly mercurial temperament.

I am the very slave of circumstanceAnd impulse – borne away with every breath!

How to communicate that frightening, entrancing quicksilver quality that glitters through Byron’s writings, that lightning shift from calm to fury, from sweetness to mockery, from love to hate? Buchanan’s paintings represent the shifts in mood through subtle juxtaposition. Thus, laid aslant a primly

Lord Byron MIRanDa SEyMouR

addressed envelope to John Hanson, Byron’s agent, we glimpse a fragment from one of his most capricious letters: in part, a clipped request to his publisher for cash (‘I have imbibed a great love of money – let me have it’); in part, a passionate defence of his great poem against the censor’s pen: (‘in short, Don Juan shall be an entire horse or none.’).

John Murray, Byron’s long­suffering but canny publisher, unites the Byron­themed paintings with another literary figure in the series. Writing to James Hogg, ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, in 1818, Murray stamped his letter with a black seal highlight­ing his association with Byron. It was Byron who had first introduced Hogg to his own publisher, back in 1814. Hogg’s disturbing masterpiece The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was published two months after Byron’s death. Few would have appreciated a novel about Calvinism, demonology, persecution and duality more than Byron himself.

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7 · blacK byRonwatercolour on paper · 11 x 15 inches

Lord Byron DaVID Mcclay

The Byron portrait seal in black wax on the letter of John Murray II to James Hogg is based on Thomas Phillips 1813 ‘Portrait of a Nobleman’, better known as the cloak portrait. Murray received one of Phillips’s several copies from Byron. He acknowledged the offer of the portrait on 18 November 1813 ‘I do most heartily accept the offer of your Lordships Portrait, as the most noble mark of friendship with which your Lordship could, in any way, honour me – I do assure your Lordship that I am truly proud of being distinguished as your publisher – and that it will be my anxious endeavour to preserve, through life, the happiness of your Lordships steady confidence.’

However, Murray had to wait several months after the sum­mer exhibition of the Royal Academy finished in July 1814 before it was finally delivered. Murray frequently mentions to Byron his pride and satisfaction of having the portrait; for example on 11 October 1822, when their relationship was

coming to an end he noted forlornly that ‘Every day of my life I sit opposite to your Lordships Portrait.’

Murray used the portrait seal in his letters to Byron, even though the poet did not like it. Byron wrote to Murray regarding the seal on 4 September 1817:

Your letter of the 15th has conveyed with its contents the impression of a Seal to which the ‘Saracen’s head’ is a Seraph – and the ‘Bull and Mouth’ a delicate device. – I knew that Calumny had sufficiently blackened me of later days – but not that it had given the features as well as com-plexion of a Negro. – Poor Augusta is not less – but rather more shocked than myself – and says, ‘people seem to have lost their recollection strangely’ when they engraved me into such a ‘blackamoor’. – Pray don’t seal (at least to me) with such a Caricature of the human numskull altogether – & if you don’t break the Sealcutter’s head – at least crack his libel (or likeness, if it should be a likeness) of mine.–

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8 · byRon fRoM pISawatercolour on paper · 11 x 15 inches

9 · Don Juanwatercolour on paper · 15 x 11 inches

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James Hogg JaMES RobERtSon

James Hogg is one of the great outsiders of our literature. Born and bred to the hardest kind of rural life, he desperately wanted to gain admittance to the cultural citadel that was post­En­lightenment Edinburgh, but when he did he was treated like a barbarian, mocked for his uncouth manners and lack of criti­cal self­awareness. Even his friend and patron Sir Walter Scott patronised him in the other, less noble sense. His social supe­riors revelled in the company of ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’, but were always sniffing at his back for the odours of ‘blood and sheep shit’, the very palette of Hugh Buchanan’s images.

At one level Hogg cared deeply what others thought of him; at another he didn’t give a damn, maintaining a good conceit of himself: ‘Dear Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school o’ chivalry? Ye are the king o’ that school, but I’m the king o’ the mountain an’ fairy school which is a far higher ane nor yours.’ Hogg saw himself as the carrier and rep­resentative of an ancient culture which was of greater worth and authenticity than that of the literati. In his long narrative poem ‘The Queen’s Wake’ (first published in 1813), the bards of Scotland compete before a courtly audience for a prize harp. The tenth bard, who ‘on Ettrick’s mountains green / In Nature’s bosom nursed had been’, is clearly a self­portrait. When he first appears:

The ladies smiled, the courtiers sneered;For such a simple air and mienBefore a court had never been.A clown he was, bred in the wild,And late from native moors exiled,In hopes his mellow mountain strainHigh favour from the great would gain.

His harp is not adorned with gold crest or coat of arms but dressed with streamers of ‘the briar­rose and the heather­bell’ – and ‘there his learning deep to prove, / Naturae Donum graved above.’ Significantly, Hogg’s own seal, as reproduced in Hugh Buchanan’s compositions, included the form of a Grecian lyre and the same motto – an assertion that both he and his writ­ings were the gifts of nature.

Robert Louis Stevenson acknowledged that Hogg’s mas­terpiece The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner had a direct influence on his own exploration of moral­ity, duality and hypocrisy: ‘The book since I read it, in black, pouring weather on Tweedside, has always haunted and puz­zled me.’ Hogg himself haunts us to this day, a defiant ghost in the archive, indelibly under our skin and persistently messing with our heads.

10 · HoGG to MuRRaywatercolour on paper · 22 x 30 inches

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11 · HoGG to byRonwatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

It was Lord Byron who promoted James Hogg to John Murray II in 1814:

I have a most amusing epistle from the Ettrick Bard Hogg – in which speaking of his bookseller – whom he denominates the ‘shabbiest’ of the trade – for not ‘lifting his bills’ he adds in so many words ‘G – d d – n him and them both’ this is a pretty prelude to asking you to adopt him (the said Hogg) but this he wishes – and if you please, you & I will talk it over – he has a poem ready for the press … – yrs. Ever Byron. PS – Seriously – I think Mr. Hogg would suit you very well – and surely he is a man of great powers and deserving of encouragement – I must knock out a tale for him – and you should at all events consider before you reject his suit.

Murray did go on to publish Hogg, and he became an intermediary between Byron and Hogg, especially after their relationship was immediately strained by Hogg’s inappropriate remarks to Byron about his marriage.

Byron & Hogg DaVID Mcclay

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Sir Walter ScottStuaRt KElly

Scott, more than any other author in the Romantic period, was obsessed with money. Obsessed of course with the getting and losing of it, but also obsessed with it as metaphor as much as a means of acquiring stuff. The bank note is not just a promise; it is a symbol, a circulating medium. Who but Scott would have written a fantasia of his narrators forming a joint stock corporation, in order to see off the threat of another character’s invention of a novel writing loom? In reviewing Mary Shelley’s The Modern Prometheus – Frankenstein – Scott described the relationship between the reader and the writer as creating ‘a sort of account current’ – drawing on the reader for license in imagination, repaying it with trust in feasibility. Creativity was a kind of overdraft. By the end, even his loyal son­in­law Lockhart said that Scott must ‘pay the price’ as well as reap the dividends of a lifetime attached to creative detachment.

Detail from Scott’s Review of Childe Harold [cat.13]

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13 · Scott’S REVIEW of cHIlDE HaRolDwatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

12 · Scott’S cHEquESwatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

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14 · SlEEpy HolloWwatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

Washington IrvingElIzabEtH l. bRaDlEy

thought to be the model for the home of the young heiress Katrina Van Tassel in ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ is in dialogue with Tim Burton’s moody take: here is Dutch thrift, security and order made manifest, proof against any rumor of a ghostly rider. Or is it? To those of a Burtonesque turn of mind the crimson seal of the Irving family looks like a splash of blood on the author’s letter, but his family motto leaves room for interpretation: ‘sub sole sub umbra virens,’ or ‘flourishing in both sunshine and shade.’ There is no doubt that Irving’s works endure today because they do just that: with the characteristic generosity of their author, they allow the reader to find her own meaning, be it dark or light – and to dream her own dreams.

‘Heads will roll,’ the cover of the Sleepy Hollow DVD proclaims. What Washington Irving would have made of director Tim Burton’s liberal (and liberally gory) interpretation of his most famous story, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ is anyone’s guess. He might have been intrigued (he encouraged the career of a young Edgar Allan Poe, after all), or he might have been flat­tered (Irving loved the fact that elements from his tales became ‘household words’ during his lifetime – words such as Gotham, Knickerbocker, and Rip Van Winkle – not to mention the headless horseman himself). He might have been indignant: the protection of authorial copyright was one of his pet causes, and as the first American writer to earn his living by his pen, he – and his British publisher and champion, John Murray – had good reason. It’s possible that Irving might simply have been confused by Burton’s feverish version: the original ‘Legend’ is a jack tale – a trickster story, with nary a beheading to be found. But he would have enjoyed the romantic, spectral gloom Burton throws over the landscape of Tarrytown, Irving’s chosen retreat on the banks of the Hudson River. Had he not done the same thing with his depiction of the Alhambra? ‘I left the Alhambra on the 29th July,’ Irving wrote to his friend Henry Brevoort in 1829 (note Hugh Buchanan’s rendering), ‘after having passed between two and three months there in a kind of oriental dream.’ Irving’s visions of ‘Saracenic and Gothic’ Spain were to serve as an introduction to that country for generations of Americans, but he is today best remembered for ‘Sleepy Hollow’ and the other tales of the Hudson River Valley: gentle fables that imbued the young United States with something like a storied past. Hugh Buchanan’s inclusion of a pen­and­ink sketch of the Philipsburg Manor house, long

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Crippled by Victorian ideas of womanhood (and a twisted spine), Isabella Bird spent her early decades as an invalid, reclining on a sofa in the home of her Yorkshire vicar father. When (in 1854) an enlightened doctor prescribed travel, she arose from her bed of pain and hightailed it down to the docks, embarking on a lifetime of almost unimaginable adventure.

Tiny, fearless and blessed with a constitution of iron, Isabella rode eight hundred miles through the Rocky Mountains on horseback, fell in love with a notorious outlaw and wrote a series of best­selling books to fund her travel. She explored the remote tribal villages of Japan and Korea, filthy back­ward places where not even zealous missionaries dared to go, endured gruelling conditions, slept in caravanserai and on the floors of mud huts. In 1892, she became the first female fel­low of the Royal Geographical Society, and late in life, when she could walk only with difficulty, was carried into Tibet on a litter.

Her final travels in Japan, China and Korea during the time of the Sino­Japanese war are here illustrated in Hugh Buchannan’s vivid watercolour. This period of travel was char­acterised by conditions of great hardship and danger – she was nearly lynched by an angry mob as she travelled up the Yangtze river – but also with unprecedented access for a foreigner and a woman, including friendship with the Korean King Gojong. Her appetite for the ravishing wide world remained insatiable till the day of her death.

Isabella BirdMEG RoSoff

15 · ISabElla bIRDwatercolour on paper · 22 x 30 inches

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16 · tHE HounD of tHE baSKERVIllESwatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle oWEn DuDlEy EDWaRDS

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) became a John Murray author in 1917 after Murray’s acquired Smith, Elder & Co. who had published his collected works in 1903 and took on the Sherlock Holmes stories after their original publisher of the short stories George Newnes withdrew from book publication in 1906. Newnes had published the Strand magazine from its launch in January 1891, and ran the first Holmes short stories there from July 1891. Holmes made the Strand, and the Strand made Holmes, for the two ‘long stories’ preceding the appear­ance of the series of short had but moderate fame. Two series of twelve bred two Newnes book collections. Holmes officially died when in December 1893 the Strand published ‘The Final Problem’ with a frontispiece grimly subtitled ‘tHE DEatH of SHERlocK HolMES’ although showing what was to be taken as the death­grapple of Holmes and Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Arthur Conan Doyle never fully consented to his ostensible death­sentence on Holmes and the first break came with retrospective ‘long’ story, serialised in the Strand in nine instalments (August 1901–April 1902): The Hound of the Baskervilles. Newnes also handled the collected new series of thirteen short stories The Return of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand and in book form. But Conan Doyle subsequently wrote Holmes stories only intermittently.

Conan Doyle was a whole­hearted supporter of the uK’s war effort and from April 1916 was serialising a multi­volume his­tory of the British campaign in France and Flanders through the Strand. But his hitherto accorded credentials for cover­age of the front were held back early in 1917 as the war begun to spawn witch­hunts. Arthur Conan Doyle had unsuccess­fully sought to have his friend Roger Casement spared from

execution for high treason in Summer 1916. And in July 1914 the Strand had published his short story ‘Danger!’ which bluntly predicted extreme vulnerability amounting to likely defeat for the uK if enemy submarine warfare cut off food supplies. The British authorities ridiculed the idea. When war broke out, the Germans showed much more interest and widely circulated it in translation. Conan Doyle summoned the aid of his most influential friend – his creation Sherlock Holmes, whose ‘War Service’ appeared in the Strand in September 1917. But the story was announced to Smith, Elder as in preparation as early as March 1917, the evidence in the Murray archive tells us, and the house of Murray having taken over found itself the holder of a hot property. For despite having only seven short stories not yet book­published Arthur Conan Doyle had determined to vindicate himself with his war story for Holmes heading a new volume to be entitled His Last Bow. The story itself made a war hero and master­counterspy of Holmes. Its con­struction forced one change. As Agatha Christie made Hercule Poirot remark in The Clocks (1963) the genius of the Holmes stories lay in the creation of Watson, through whose eyes we see the godlike Holmes otherwise inaccessible to us. ‘His Last Bow’ was the first whose plot required disguises not only for Holmes and Watson but of the narrative itself. It worked: the German spy Von Bork was foiled in the story, the uK censors foiled because of it, and Arthur Conan Doyle won back his cre­dentials. But so urgent had been his conscription of Holmes that Murray received copy for the book His Last Bow in May before the short story ‘His Last Bow’ received its final improve­ments, so for once it is the Strand which is the definitive text. We used it for the Oxford Sherlock Holmes.

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17 · oSbERtwatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

Osbert Lancaster JaMES Knox

In his post­war heyday, Osbert Lancaster was one of the fore­most artistic personalities of his generation, whose front page pocket cartoons in Lord Beaverbrook’s mighty Daily Express entertained the nation for almost forty years, whose designs for opera and ballet made him the toast of Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, and whose books of light verse, memoirs, parodies, travel and cartoons made him a constant star of Jock Murray’s spring and autumn lists.

Born in London in 1908, Osbert sprang, as he put it, from the ‘old upper middles of Victorian England’ cushioned by commercial fortunes on both sides of the family. An educa­tion at Charterhouse and Oxford, which culminated in a fourth class degree, fostered, on the side, his talent as an art­ist, which in turn was honed by stints at three different art schools. Oxford, and in particular his friend John Betjeman, also nurtured his love of architecture as well as his dandyism characterised by flourishes inspired by La Belle Epoque such as button holes, canes, and rakish hats.

After Oxford, Osbert worked for the influential Architectural Review, which led to the publication by Jock Murray of Pillar to Post, an illustrated satire on British architecture which gave Osbert his first glimpse of fame as the inventor of amusing new styles (which have since entered the lexicon) such as Stockbrokers’ Tudor and Pont Street Dutch. Jock Murray was to remain his publisher and the closest of friends for the rest of Osbert’s life.

Of the many strands in Osbert’s career, Hugh Buchanan highlights his work as a cartoonist which is reflected in the thousands of original drawings, marked up for publication, in the Murray archive. Osbert’s first ‘pocket’ cartoon, indeed

the first to be published in the British press, appeared in January 1939. Apart from an eighteen month break in the war, his witty asides on everything from the H­bomb to the mini­skirt, channelled through a cast of characters, who them­selves became national figures, led by Maudie, the Countess of Littlehampton, poured forth until 1978 when he laid down his pencil following a stroke.

Hugh Buchanan’s portrait matches descriptions of him in late middle age: ‘His head’, recalled a colleague at the Express, ‘poised above a strongly striped collar, has curious dignity: large eyes reflect an inner amusement, and outwardly miss nothing; a well tended neo­Edwardian moustache goes well with a habit of shooting his cuffs’.

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Passports and maps are the tools of bureaucracy and adminis­tration. A passport allows governments to track the movement of individuals. A map displays the geographical features of a country, and marks the roads, settlements and boundaries that people have imposed on it. The information they contain is purely factual, expressed in stamps and symbols; yet nothing releases the excitement, liberation and romance of travel like a passport and a map. For Patrick Leigh Fermor they were talis­mans of huge significance, treasured among his most precious possessions. No matter how far he allowed his imagination to recreate the past or how skilfully he wove his memories into elaborate tapestries, it was these well­worn, dog­eared maps and passports that put the solid ground under everything he wrote.’

Patrick Leigh FermoraRtEMIS coopER

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Detail from Paddy’s Passports [cat.19]

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18 · paDDy’S Map of cREtEwatercolour on paper · 15 x 22 inches

19 · paDDy’S paSSpoRtSwatercolour on paper · 22 x 30 inches

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The Contributors

Sincere thanks are due to the distinguished contributors to this catalogue:

ElIzabEtH bRaDlEy Historian, writer and journalist, Elizabeth has done much to promote New York and Washington Irving through her writing, in particular her editing of the Penguin Classics edition of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories (2014).

loRD byRon The current Lord Byron is the 13th to hold that title. He maintains a strong interest in the poetical 6th Lord Byron through his valuable patronage and activities with The Byron Society at home and abroad.

aRtEMIS coopER With her biography Patrick Leigh Femor, An Adventure (2012) and the posthumous completion of Paddy’s trilogy of his famous youthful journey in The Broken Road (2013) with Colin Thubron, Artemis has rewarded his readers, old and new, with two indispensible works.

oWEn DuDlEy EDWaRDS An acknowledged inter national expert on a number of historical authors, periods and themes, Owen is particularly distinguished for his deep knowledge and expertise of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his works, for which he was the ideal general editor of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes series.

StuaRt KElly Journalist, author, literary editor, critic and book prize panellist, Stuart is almost as prolific as one of his heroes Sir Walter Scott. His Scott-land (2011) is essential read­ing for anyone wishing to understand Scott’s cultural influence.

JaMES Knox In curating the hugely successful Osbert Lancaster exhibition at the Wallace Collection in 2008 James helped bring the genius of Osbert to a wider audience. James is formerly Managing Director of The Art Newspaper and currently Director of the Fleming Wyfold Art Foundation.

JaMES RobERtSon Multi­award winning novelist, short story writer, poet and promoter of the Scots language, James’s The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006) is a brilliant rework­ing of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

MEG RoSoff Prize winning novelist and author Meg is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She discussed her interest and admiration of intrepid traveller Isabella Bird in the bbc’s Great Lives series in 2013.

MIRanDa SEyMouR Novelist, biographer and critic, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Miranda’s many books include her definitive Life of Mary Shelley (2000). She is currently researching a biography of Lord Byron’s wife and his daughter, the mathematician Ada Lovelace.

KatHRyn SutHERlanD As Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, Kathryn is a renowned international expert not only on Jane Austen but on Romantic period novelists and writers. These interests often find her immersed in literary manuscripts and archives.

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HuGH bucHanan was born in Edinburgh in 1958. The city instilled in him a lifelong 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 of interiors for the Prince of Wales, the National Trust and the House of Commons. For the last decade he has concentrated on paintings of libraries and archives.

In spring 2000 Buchanan was a participant in The Art of Memory: contemporary painters in search of Marcel Proust, at the National Theatre on the South Bank in London, The Lair of the Leopard: Lampedusa (2005), Everyone Sang: a view of Siegfried Sassoon and his world (2006), and Jumping for Joyce: Contemporary painters revel in the world of James Joyce (2013). In 2009 his exhibition of library paint­ings, Enlightenment, was shown at The Old Town House, University of Aberdeen. In 2010 his exhibition Words and Deeds explored the archive at Drumlanrig in Dumfriessshire. In April 2013 he was invited to show a selection of library and archive paintings at the Historical Fiction Festival, Summerhall, Edinburgh where his exhibition The Esterhazy Archive was also held.

Hugh Buchanan’s paintings are in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Edinburgh City Art Centre, the University of Edinburgh, 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 1987 he was one of Ten British Watercolourists shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, Spain. In 1991 he exhibited at the Lincoln Center, New York. In 1994 Hugh Buchanan 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 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 2005 his paintings featured in Watercolours and Drawings from the Collection of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh and Queen’s Gallery, London.

His work has featured in two limited edition publications with accompanying texts by Peter Davidson: The Eloquence of Shadows (1994) and Winter Light (2010).

Hugh Buchanan

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Published by John Martin Gallery for the exhibition at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, 26 June – 6 September 2015, and John Martin Gallery Mayfair, London, 18 September – 10 October 2015.

ISbn 978 0 9932195 2 8

Images © Hugh Buchanan 2015 Text © The contributors 2015 Catalogue © John Martin Gallery 2015

Photography by the National Library of Scotland Designed and typeset in Fleischman by Dalrymple Printed in Belgium by Albe De Coker

George IV Bridge · Edinburgh EH1 1EW+44 (0)131 623 3700 · [email protected] · www.nls.uk

38 Albemarle Street · London W1S 4JG+44 (0)20 7499 1314 · [email protected]

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9 7 80 9 9 3 2 1 9 5 2 8

I Sbn 9780993219528