The dramatic potential in the architecture of great houses has always played a major role in Hugh Buchanan’s career: a subject he has explored within and without across a wide range of periods, styles and locations throughout Britain. What most such buildings share, nestling in their bosom and forming often their most intimate core, is a library. It is this eloquent space and its contents that Hugh Buchanan has chosen as the theme of his most focused exhibition to date, his twelfth with Francis Kyle Gallery since 1984.

In some instances returning to already familiar, cherished locations, Hugh Buchanan’s quest for libraries has taken him to Norfolk to paint William Kent’s masterpieces at Holkham and Houghton; to Hereford and the gothic at Eastnor; to the light-filled elegance of Wren’s library at Trinity, Cambridge and the immense Codrington Library at All Souls, Oxford and then on to the monumental grandeur of Sledmere and the Imperial Library at the Hofburg in Vienna. Particularly in the great classical libraries, the visual appeal of period bindings is fused with Buchanan’s long-nurtured fondness for the baroque. “Rank upon rank of convex bindings stand in muster,” Buchanan comments, “like the inverse of some giant fluted column, with the strong architectural presence of these harmoniously conceived rooms (I am thinking of Kent’s use of specific large folios to form pilasters in Walpole’s intimate library at Houghton) rendered all the more tantalising by the centuries of knowledge and enquiry stored within.”

“It was perhaps in Dublin,” Buchanan reflects, “that I found my vision of libraries most vividly realised. Strong sunlight raking across tattered and ribboned volumes interleaved with scraps of paper was the actual scene that I always had in my mind. And there it was – row upon row of dilapidated books bound up by a thousand pink-ribboned bows which appeared in the low October light as nothing more or less than a flock of exotic butterflies settled on their spines…

“After a while it was the books in isolation that began to interest me more and more, this is where I felt I could break new ground. As so often in these days, in my most ambitious work I reject the general in favour of the specific, so now in many cases, I have rejected the more obvious broad view of a library in favour of a teetering stack of books against an inky background, or perhaps the corner of a chair set against some library mesh, which in my view can more perfectly sum up the qualities of a place.”

The choice of a single overarching theme gives the present series greater focus and unity than was the case with any of Buchanan’s earlier exhibitions, each of which encompassed broadly architectural subjects with a classical bias. However, ever since the artist has been concentrating on interior subjects, a taste for the subject of paper has been frequently in evidence. Treated, together with light itself, as an element which in the absence of human figures animates these compositions, paper has already made an appearance: here for instance as a single sheet (one presumes a letter?) wafted in a current of air down a royal stairwell; there as a scroll or map retrieved for the same purpose from some capacious muniment room; or, indeed, as a small but eloquent stack of books, evidently a private collection, standing in the for the personality of the soldier poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Working now on an impressively large scale, Buchanan deploys his unequalled command of the idiom, doubly appropriate where the subject itself is largely a product of fragile paper, to bring out the tactile appeal of books and their multifarious bindings: the subdued glow of damson morocco bindings with their gilt script at the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum; lightly scuffed calf and rainbow marbling on volumes of the Vies des Peintres at Eastnor, rendered on a gargantuan scale; the simple stroke of unworked paper to suggest light falling brilliantly on the open pages of a book at the library of the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House – these effects can surely be numbered among Buchanan’s supreme achievements in a career which has expanded the horizons of watercolour today.

In our all too destructive and iconoclastic times, books have often held for artists the bleakest connotations: burnt, petrified, cast in forbidding iron, where they express the savagery of war which consumed the great library of Louvain, the monastic collections of Tibet, the Vijećnica in Sarajevo. Hugh Buchanan has chosen, instead, to celebrate the life of books as he has savoured them in their natural habitat, the sanctuaries which they happily continue to inhabit and from where they serve still as a source of pleasure and enlightenment.

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