Bookshelf Travelling – 6th December

Bookshelf Travelling is a meme which was originally hosted by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness, but at the moment I’m gathering together any other Bookshelf Travelling posts.

This week I’m featuring the bottom shelf of a Billy bookcase in my sunroom. This is a room at the back of our house looking on to the garden and it’s the main reason we bought this place. Anyway, it’s a shelf of art books this week. In normal times we visit a lot of art galleries, exhibitions and museums and of course that hasn’t been possible this year. As Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland we have been able to access some interesting talks by experts so that has been an unexpected plus anyway.

Art Books

This shelf houses books on Renoir, Tissot, Matisse – mainly well known artists, so I’m just going to feature a few lesser known artists.

James McIntosh Patrick is very well known in Scotland, he was born in nearby Dundee in 1907 and died in 1998 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. You can see images of some of his work here. Most of his paintings are of local rural scenes in the east of Scotland, I really like his work.

I love woodcuts and Four Hedges A Gardener’s Chronicle by Claire Leighton has 88 illustrations in it, as this is a gardening book it’s doubly of interest to me. You can see images of some of her work here. Clare Leighton was the sister of the poet Roland Leighton, Vera Brittain’s fiance who was killed in World War 1.

Introducing The Glasgow Boys
was published by Glasgow museums and written by museum curators Jean Walsh and Hugh Stevenson. You can see some of the artists’ work here.

I love children’s illustrated books, not all of them of course but some are beautiful and frankly probably aren’t published for children to get their hands on, unless they’re being supervised! A Treasury of The Great Children’s Book Illustrators features works by Edward Lear, John Tenniel, Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, Beatrix Potter, Ernest H.Shepard, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen, Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and W.W. Denslow.

A Treasury of the Great Children's Book Illustrators cover

Other Bookshelf Travellers this week are:

A Son of the Rock
Bitter Tea and Mystery

A Chasm in Time by Patricia R. Andrew

 A Chasm in Time cover

A Chasm in Time: Scottish War Art and Artists in the Twentieth Century by Patricia R. Andrew is a beautifully produced book and a great read. Anyone interested in art and history will find it fascinating I’m sure, you don’t have to be Scottish!

I was most interested in the World War 1 art which features such images as warships in Scapa Flow and the Firth of Forth, but it isn’t only war and weaponry that feature in the paintings. I particularly like James McIntosh Patrick’s Tay Bridge painting, but I hadn’t realised that this was the view from the front of the artist’s house. The government had commissioned art which showed the civilian side of life during the war.

The Tay Bridge from my Studio Window

Tay Bridge
The domestic scene below is of the view from the back of the artist’s house, showing his wife hanging out the washing and their wee daughter helping.

A City Garden
a city garden

There was only one thing that annoyed me about this book – it should have been proof read more closely. I know, I know, you could say that for almost any book nowadays. I think people run a spell checker and think that will sort things out but it doesn’t weed out such things as abroad when aboard should have been printed, or panting instead of painting. There were also quite a lot of hyphenated words where no hyphens should have been, such as wit-nessed, com-bination and Cran-ston. I think these must have come about when the book was being set out differently and not corrected when the design was changed. But that’s me being nit-picking, it’s just that I know that if I had written such a lovely book I would have been furious at these mistakes.

I borrowed this from the library but I intend to buy a copy of it as I know I’ll want to dip into it now and again.