No Foreign Land : Landscapes from the Fleming Collection

29 Oct 2014-29 Apr 2015

Overview

As it stands today, the Fleming Collection is dominated by depictions of land and sea, with landscapes comprising sixty per cent of the paintings acquired. Yet many of these paintings are not of native Scottish terrain but of other places: ‘foreign land’. An unusual double-sided painting by William Crozier, ‘The Slopes of Fiesole, Tuscany’ (verso: ‘Edinburgh from Castle Street’), perhaps best exemplifies this: on one side a scene from a balcony in Tuscany while, on the reverse, a view towards Edinburgh Castle from Castle Street. As one looks out across the Mediterranean land and sky, the other looks inward, towards the heart of Edinburgh, the eye drawn along and up the curved street. Given the ubiquity of landscapes within Scottish art, the works in No Foreign Land challenge typically romantic associations of Scottish landscape as being often synonymous with distant mountains, deep lochs, and vast skies.