Hugh Buchanan’s paintings do not merely depict, they inhabit an architecture. You feel yourself in the rooms and houses which he has, over thirty years, so incomparably evoked. You feel yourself inside, not merely particular spaces, but in those spaces as first conceived by the great architects who designed them.

A.N. Wilson, Autumn 2008

As a painter who has pursued an enduring affair with the architecture and interiors of great houses, it was inevitable that Hugh Buchanan would be attracted to the libraries which typically lie at their heart, a subject he first explored in his 2008/9 exhibitions in London and Aberdeen. Within such libraries, determining their pulse, there is generally an archival core, sometimes housed in a muniment or (in Scotland) a ‘charter’ room: a treasury of documents, deeds, contracts, letters, original house plans and artworks which in sum record the history of the house and its occupants. Far more than merely supporting material, the frozen voices of earlier generations, these archives are proto-libraries, a bridge to an earlier time when, in papyrus, vellum, parchment critical events and transactions were described in detail, before being stored in boxes and on flat shelves, as can still be seen today in, for instance, the Renaissance Bibliotheca Malatestiana in Cesena, or further back into antiquity, in the classical Roman library reconstructed in the Museum of Roman Civilisation in Rome’s EUR district.  

It is in such libraries and archives in private houses and institutions mostly in Scotland but also in England, southern France and Bavaria that Hugh Buchanan has been ferreting for his new exhibition. ‘If there is a narrative underpinning my burrowing in archives and among old books and folios,’ comments Hugh Buchannan, ‘it is about what it feels like to enter and explore an archive. What I relish most is paper pure and simple, and the endless ways I can explore its manifestations and push the limits of its expressiveness.’In the Bishop’s Library at Carpentras, once summer residence of the Avignon Popes, Buchanan had a ‘Joseph Beuys moment’ battling with massed ranks of box-files and folios before reaching the heraldic volumes he was looking for.

Book-ending the sequence of still lifes forming the main body of the exhibition are more spacious compositions devoted to architecturally significant spaces only tangentially related to the library theme but which set the role of the archive in a wider context. The atrium of London’s Soane Museum and the Great Hall of the Antiquarium at the Residenz in Munich are both densely populated by portrait busts, essential inhabitants of any self-respecting classical library seen as a shrine dedicated to history and memory. Such collections point back also to an era when the accumulation of knowledge through books went hand in hand with the creation of Kunstkammer and cabinets of curiosity packed with every kind of natural as well as man-made phenomenon, universal collections which are the ancestors of today’s museums and libraries.

At Drumlanrig Castle the sanctuary was breached when the artist was allowed to penetrate the tighter, vaulted space of the inner ‘charter’ room to revel in what forms the exhibition’s heartland: a tumbling proliferation of deeds, depositions, ledgers and seal-bearing decorated charters from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a magical terrain of vellum, parchment, paper shaped into a multiplicity of intriguing configurations in the typically low, raking sunlight. At Traquair, Scotland’s oldest continuously inhabited house dating back to at least 1100, Buchanan continues his theme sequence of delicate still lifes featuring more early documents interspersed with bundles of private letters prettily tied with ribbons of pink silk or overflowing from leather boxes, a symphony of surfaces, shadows and suggestive snippets.  
                
A still life featuring folios of music by Purcell alongside carvings by Grinling Gibbons from the library at St Paul’s Cathedral introduces a musical dimension and the exhibition is completed with broader treatments of another five more libraries at Harewood House, Worcester College, Oxford, the University of Aberdeen and the Signet Library and Register House in Edinburgh.

HUGH BUCHANAN

HUGH BUCHANAN was born in Edinburgh in 1958 and educated at Edinburgh College of Art. After completing post-graduate studies ‘with distinction’ in1981, he was awarded travel scholarships to the Middle East and, later, North Italy and the Balkans and he has travelled regularly throughout Europe to visit and paint in watercolour buildings and interiors from the Renaissance to the Baroque.  Over several years he worked on commissions for the National Trust and in 1987 was invited by the Prince of Wales to paint a series of interiors of Balmoral, subsequently completing a further sequence at Highgrove in 1994.  In 1988 he was commissioned by the House of Commons to paint four interiors in the Palace of Westminster.

Hugh Buchanan’s paintings are in the Collections of HM The Queen, HRH Queen Elizabeth the late Queen Mother, HRH The Prince of Wales, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Palace of Westminster, the University of Edinburgh, the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Flemings Bank, Deutsche Bank, the National Trust for Scotland, the National Trust for England. 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 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 Centre, New York.  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 2005/6 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.

In 1994 The Eloquence of Shadows, a volume of architectural meditations by Hugh Buchanan with text and verses by Peter Davidson, was published and in the same year he was given a major Retrospective by the National Trust at Petworth House. Hugh Buchanan has been represented since 1985 by Francis Kyle Gallery where he has held twelve one-man exhibitions between 1986 and 2008. In spring 2000 he was a major participant in The Art of Memory: contemporary painters in search of Marcel Proust, a theme exhibition which with new contributions by the artists participating travelled to the National Theatre on the South Bank in January 2001. He took part in the theme exhibitions Roma in 2003, Lair of the Leopard (2005), Everyone Sang: a view of Siegfried Sassoon and his world (2006) and РОДИНА: contemporary painters from the West winter in Russia (2008).

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