In Hugh Buchanan’s paintings at Hampton Court and Belvoir Castle, it may be a sense of drama expressed through movement that first strikes the viewer as he follows the fall of light leading up staircases, along galleries lined with classical busts, pausing here and there to dwell on eloquent detail: a feline-footed chair, a table caught in light filtering through a high window.  Among the broad range of these watercolours in which objects emerge into light or disappear into shadows where their presence can still be felt, the Holbein Chamber at Strawberry Hill stands out for its masterfully rendered fan-vaulting, as does the complex geometry of fractured light descending on chandelier, bust, marble and fluted column in Buchanan’s treatment of the Regent Gallery at Belvoir Castle.

As Hugh Buchanan’s most characteristic work in watercolour is animated by his virtuoso handling of light, the inclusion of figures would with few exceptions distract from the mood of his compositions.  Instead, an equally strong but less direct indication of human presence is provided by half-open documents or books (sometimes seen fluttering in currents of air), a device gracefully employed in interiors painted at Duns Castle in Berwickshire.  In another new group from Apsley House, the evidence of human presence is provided by a series of portraits which peer from the shadows.

In an unidentified great house, Hugh Buchanan subjects a single state room to increasingly intimate scrutiny, progressing from small-scale overall views to close focus in an impressively larger format on single features of furnishing - the gilded paw of a console table, a lion-headed chair finial - echoes of the artist’s earlier innovative approach to interiors at Osterley Park.  Similarly at Hatchlands he confines himself to isolating a solitary torchère trapped in the embrace of a frayed damask hanging.

The exhibition is completed with watercolours from Russia: the great staircase at the Hermitage and the Cameron Gallery at Tsarskoe Selo, an ideal subject for the committed enthusiast of Robert Adam, where a bold approach to perspective, from an unusually low viewpoint, seems to fill the magnificent, now empty spaces with echoes still of the clamour of court functions and entertainments, recalling the breathless cavalcade of revellers who parade through their country’s history in Alexander Sokurov’s memorable Russian Ark.  

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