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

I never envied the task of the Patrick Geddes exhibition committee: to mount an art exhibition about a man who never made art. Patrick Geddes, active in late 19th and early 20th century Edinburgh, surrounded himself with artists and thinkers, and had an irrepressible energy for making things happen. You can’t point at a picture and say “Geddes made that,” but instead you might explain how Geddes brought the artist into contact with the people, styles, ideas or places which made it what it is.

And therein lies the problem. While Patrick Geddes’s influence lies firmly at the root of the Scots Renascence, the Celtic Revival, and Edinburgh’s contribution to the Arts and Crafts Movement (to name but a few), it is not immediately visible at the surface. Aware of the perils of trying to do too much at once, the six-strong exhibition committee chose to focus exclusively on Geddes’s life-long connections with France.

The show, tucked neatly into that cheerful concourse between the Portrait Gallery’s shop and café, is inevitably top-heavy with documentation and interpretation, but also offers a fascinating array of Scottish and Breton paintings which clearly speak of cross-cultural dialogue.

John Duncan and Charles Mackie were two key Scottish artists in Geddes’s circle, and their works feature in the show alongside that of Gauguin’s follower, the Nabi painter Paul Sérusier, as well as Lucien Pissarro (son of the better known Camille), and even Edouard Vuillard. Common themes recur, such as that of rustic peasants in seasonal tasks, and there are clear stylistic connections, seen in flat, decorative schemes with starkly delineated areas of local colour. Prime among these is Sérusier’s Apple Picking, whose six serene Breton women take centre stage in the larger of the two exhibition rooms. I would have liked to have seen Gauguin’s Vision after the Sermon borrowed from up the road to complete the set.

Equally, it would have been pleasing to see some of the richly decorative embroideries of Phoebe Anna Traquair (another of Geddes’s circle) hung next to John Duncan’s mural designs for Pitreavie Castle. Duncan and Mackie did a great number of murals at Ramsay Garden, Geddes’s intellectual colony near Edinburgh Castle, but it is a disappointment to find that these are only represented by post-card sized reproductions.

The display cases, video and wall panels bring Geddes’s summer meetings to life, where men and women from Scotland and beyond shared their thoughts on philosophy, geography, language and culture, in what must have been a liberating intellectual environment. There are four display cabinets in all, the contents of which will no doubt make a fascinating book (due out in April), but this amount of correspondence and printed material inevitably leads to fatigue in even the most dedicated of visitors.

Nonetheless, the show successfully makes a connection between the French artists and their Scottish contemporaries, and establishes Geddes as the link between them. The overall design is elegant, and given the tough challenge they faced, the curators have done a fairly remarkable job in telling the story of Geddes and his French Connection.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 01.02.04