Patrick Geddes: The French Connection
Until April 18; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) – botanist, ecologist, sociologist, town planner and general cultural impresario – was so influential in Edinburgh 100 years ago that it is hard to sum him up in one go. “Part of the reason he hasn’t been fully appreciated,” explains Professor Murdo Macdonald of Dundee University, “is that he was so diverse, and it’s difficult to know where to come in. He’s routinely described as father of town planning for example, and we owe a lot to the town planners just because they kept that alive. But if you describe him as father of town planning you forget that he was also a key figure in the Celtic Revival, a good friend of Charles Rennie Macintosh, and a pioneering ecologist.”

Perhaps because of this eclecticism, exhibitions about Geddes are rare, but to mark 150 years since his birth the Scottish National Portrait Gallery has organised a show – starting this Saturday – which looks particularly at the links Geddes forged between Scotland and France.

“He was a great lover of French culture and French thought,” explains Belinda Thomson, independent art historian and chair of the exhibition committee, “and a great apologist for it both in Scotland and in America, where he used France as a model in his lecture tour for the way culture could be active.”

Among his many and varied accomplishments, Geddes started an artist’s colony in Edinburgh’s Ramsay Garden, made the Camera Obscura into a key landmark in the city, founded the Franco-Scottish Society, re-established the ancient Scots College in the French town of Montpellier, kicked off the Scots Renascence, designed Edinburgh Zoo, regenerated Old Town slums, sewed the seeds of the Edinburgh Festival and published a radical journal.

Geddes was a man of action: “It is only by thinking things out as one lives them,” he wrote, “and living things out as one thinks them, that a man or a society can really be said to think or even live at all”. His motto was Vivendo Discimus, by living we learn, and this he applied faithfully to every aspect of his life and work. He founded the Edinburgh Social Union to promote art in public areas, and to teach arts and crafts to “the poorer classes”, so that they could improve their own environments. Many of Phoebe Anna Traquair’s decorative murals around Edinburgh are a direct result of this initiative.

Geddes believed that society was suffering a ‘Kakotopia’, the ‘Paleotechnic age’ of heavy industry, where economics and art were divorced and the people lived a hell of ‘money-wealth and real poverty’. War was inevitable, he wrote in 1910, as competition moved towards militarism and the Kakotopia worsened. Geddes yearned for a great Eutopia [sic], which would manage its resources sensibly, in harmony with the environment, art and literature, and recognising the value of a happy, healthy workforce.

This was not a nostalgic desire for the return to some rural idyll – it was a thoroughly modern vision which resonates strongly with our own 21st century ideals. “So many of his ideas were ahead of their time,” argues Thomson, “and are alive ideas for us today. Particularly his linking the study of plants and ecology to the way we live in cities – those are the things that he is remembered for, rightly, and some of the ideas at the time seemed wacky, but as time has gone by they’ve become more pertinent.”

One of Geddes’s lasting legacies is nothing less than the Edinburgh Festival. “One of the fascinating angles we’ve wanted to explore in the exhibition,” says Thomson, “is Geddes’s summer meetings, which he held in Edinburgh through the period 1887 to 1899. These took place in August, and they drew not only Scots and British contributors but also quite a strong body of French people, as well as Germans, and international figures.”

“Certainly some of the thinkers that came were extraordinary figures in their time,” continues Thomson. “They span the complete political spectrum, really. You’ve got very radical anarchists, some of them were more or less on the run from France at the time because there was a big clamp down on anarchism there. There were also more conservative figures who had interesting ideas about education, art and morality and so on.”

Geddes applied this consciously international outlook to The Evergreen, a seasonal journal which he produced in four volumes from 1895. The lavishly bound books, illustrated by Scottish and French artists (including Paul Sérusier), include poetry, fiction and essays, in English, French and Gaelic. The Evergreen’s two main concerns were the revival of Celtic art and literature and the establishment of Scotland as “one of the European Powers of Culture”. Some people were not impressed – notably HG Wells who declared of the first issue that “It’s bad from cover to cover and even the covers are bad”. Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to make up their own minds.

Visitors will also have a rare chance – through photographs and video – to see some of the murals painted by Geddes’s colony of artists – which included John Duncan, Phoebe Anna Traquair and Charles Mackie. “There are murals in Ramsay Garden which are only slowly being rediscovered,” explains Thomson, “and some of those will feature in the exhibition. They were covered with plaster so it was a very laborious job to uncover the ones that we know about and there’s every good reason to believe that there are others still there.”

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.01.04