The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Fife in the Frame
St Andrews Museum May 31 - August 24
PART OF the raison d’etre – and the greatest attraction – of the East Neuk Festival is its location in one of the most beautiful coastal areas of Scotland.
Top-class chamber music performances have been staged in some of the area’s most attactive and unusual venues and have brought international artistes and audiences to North East Fife during the last days of June and early July.
Over the decade of its existence – this year is its 10th anniversary – it has also spread its remit to take in literature and the visual arts and this year, a special exhibition highlighting the painted beauty of the Fife landscape is taking pride of place during the run of the East Neuk Festival (June 27 - July 6) and beyond.
Fife in the Frame opens on May 31 at the St Andrews Museum, a collaboration between the Fife Cultural Trust and the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation, putting on display a clutch of distinguished works, past and present, inspired by Fife.
It also fits perfectly with the way that the annual festival is rooted in the landscape and draws its artistic strength and inspiration from the coast’s strong spirit of place and the distinctive character of its setting.
Masterminding the event is James Holloway, director of the Fleming Collection and formerly the director for 14 years of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Having bumped into East Neuk Festival director Svend Brown, an old friend, in Edinburgh last year, the idea of sending an exhibition of some of the collection’s appropriate works quickly took off.
The Fleming Collection was born in the late 1960s when the former merchant bank founded by Robert Fleming of Dundee moved into new London offices and started to acquire works by Scottish artists or of Scottish scenes.
In 2000 the bank was sold to J P Morgan and the collection came under the auspices of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, with a dedicated gallery in Mayfair. Today it is considered to be the finest private collection of Scottish art in the world, with examples dating from 1770 to the present day, and is pivotal as a showcase to the wider world, with a brief, backed by a large endowment, to promote Scottish art and artists.
This year, the foundation also teamed up for the first time with the Royal Scottish Academy, offering a major prize for painting as part of the New Contemporaries show.
James Holloway explained: “Svend and I and the wonderful Donald MacDonald [whose brainchild the East Neuk Festival was] then drove round Fife rather happily looking for venues and St Andrews Museum seemed the best choice.
“It’s a wonderful festival – I’m a regular myself – and this is a way to celebrate the places that have inspired it.
“We were also absolutely delighted to team up with the Fife Cultural Trust, to put together choices from their and our collections in a way not seen before.”
Perched high on a cliff edge, St Monans’ Kirk is one of the festival’s most atmospheric and intimate concert venues and it and the village’s harbour setting were perfect subjects for painters like Sir William Gillies, Charles Lees, John Guthrie Spence Smith, William Milne, William Wilson and Alexander Ignatius Roche.
Leading Scottish Colourist George Leslie Hunter spent the most successful and productive years of his working life in Fife during the 1920s, producing village landscapes at Ceres and Lower Largo, while John Henry Lorimer was inspired by his family home at Kellie Castle, especially in his painting Sundown in Spring.
The hugely influential Gillies also produced paintings ofAnstruther and Kilrenny was the subject of a painting by the equally eminent Sir William MacTaggart.
Right up to the present day, the coast and its visual appeal has continued to inspire painters, including Donald McIntyre, who died in 2009 and who produced By The Harbour, Crail.
James will miss the opening on May 31 – he is heading off to Budapest on a motorbike! – but intends to visit later in the run.
He pointed out: “The exhibition is on until August, taking in the dates of the Pittenweem Arts Festival which has become yet another vibrant artistic event in the East Neuk.
“We are always looking for ways to use resources wisely and to add value to other marvellous collections, like the Fife one.
“It’s something we would like to replicate in the future to allow more people to see these pictures and to spread the good news about the influence of both historic and contemporary Scottish art.”