Hugh Buchanan John Murray Catalogue
Hugh Buchanan John Murray Catalogue
Hugh Buchanan John Murray Catalogue
paints the
John Murray Archive
Austen, Byron,
Conan Doyle, Etc ...
John R. Murray
hugh buchanan
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Jane Austen
Kathryn Sutherland
Though Jane Austen had dealings with several publishers, the
John Murray Archive allows us a unique perspective on her
brief career as a novelist. In the Murray account books and
in correspondence with his talent scout and journal editor,
William Gifford, we discover precious evidence for her early
esteem and track details for the economic fortunes of a writer
who was not averse to admitting that she wrote for money as
well as fame: tho I like praise as well as anybody, I like what
Edward [her brother] calls Pewter too (30 November 1814, to
her niece Fanny Knight).
Jane Austen was a published author for just seven years of her
short life from 1811 to 1817 and engaged with John Murray
II by autumn 1815. Murray brought out Emma and a second
edition of Mansfield Park (both in 1816), and two short nov
els, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, issued together in 1818
within months of Austens death. He was not noted as a novel
publisher; most of the novel manuscripts offered to the firm
(including that of Frankenstein) were rejected. Emma is his first
novel by an English woman writer; yet he was among the most
fashionable publishers of his day, cultivating influential connec
tions and establishing his imprint as a leading literary brand.
In some ways, John Murray and Jane Austen were on sim
ilar trajectories in the 1810s. She was forging a reputation as
a new kind of fiction writer, almost counter-novelistic in the
illusion of reality she created, while he was in the vanguard of
a new breed of publisher. Emma issued in three volumes for a
guinea, with a dedication to the Prince Regent, and a promo
tional review by Walter Scott in Murrays own periodical the
Quarterly Review gave Jane Austens career a major hike and
the critical seal of approval to a serious talent.
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Lord Byron
Robin, 13th Baron Byron
Byron was not known for his love of artists or art galleries.
There is therefore a certain irony one which Byron would
surely have appreciated in the fact that, perhaps more than
any other of the Romantic Poets, Byron has always inspired
artists.
His love of climes warmer than his chilly homeland give
me a sun, I care not how hot ; his musings on the iconic
sights of Italy and Greece; his wandering and revolutionary
spirit; above all the drama of his own life and his passionate
response to the people and places he visited have provided
limitless scope for artists to create their own visual interpre
tations of his work. In France, Delacroix found inspiration in
Byron for the exotic and emotional themes of his creations,
while in England it is Turners images which are most associ
ated with Byrons poetry; impossible to read Byrons lines on
Sounion or The Bridge of Sighs without Turners paintings
coming to mind.
Hugh Buchanan has created very different images with
which to conjure up the spirit of Byron. Drawing on the
Murray Archive from the National Library of Scotland, his
evocative water colours give an almost physical experience of
the texture of the manuscripts and the smell of the sealing
wax. I particularly like the detailed image of Byrons seal with
the letter B and the coronet imprinted deeply in the red wax;
you sense the moment when Byron has finished an amusing
scribble to a close friend and plunges his seal into the hot wax
before sending the letter on its way. To bring us such proximity
to Byron is a fine achievement.
5 Byron seal study
watercolour on paper 11 x 15 inches
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Lord Byron
Miranda Seymour
Lord Byron turned twenty-four in 1812, the year in which the
publication of Cantos I and II of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage
transformed a mocking newcomer (Byrons 1809 satire, English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, had caused sparks to fly on both
sides of the border) into a poet of international stature. A
poem that promoted the image of the romantic loner (Apart
he stalked in joyless reverie, And from his native land resolved
to go) turned its handsome author addressed by an ecstatic
Lady Caroline Lamb as if Byron himself was the gloom-soaked
Childe into the darling of society.
Poetry is notoriously prophetic. In 1812, Byron could not
know that his own exile was only four years away; that his flight
from scandal, debt and a disastrous marriage would resolve
itself into a permanent absence that ended with his doomed
journey to Greece where, aged thirty-six, he died.
That sense of exile in flight, as it were, from his own self
haunts the marvellous series of paintings in which Hugh
Buchanan delicately collates elements of Byrons literary life
abroad in a way that is wonderfully suggestive both of his pas
sion (blood-red wax spatters the letter lying beneath one of two
representations of Byrons splendid, coroneted seals) and of
the poets exasperating, fascinatingly mercurial temperament.
6 Byron seal
watercolour on paper 15 x 22 inches
Lord Byron
David m c clay
The Byron portrait seal in black wax on the letter of John
Murray II to James Hogg is based on Thomas Phillips 1813
Portrait of a Nobleman, better known as the cloak portrait.
Murray received one of Phillipss several copies from Byron.
He acknowledged the offer of the portrait on 18 November
1813 I do most heartily accept the offer of your Lordships
Portrait, as the most noble mark of friendship with which
your Lordship could, in any way, honour me I do assure
your Lordship that I am truly proud of being distinguished as
your publisher and that it will be my anxious endeavour to
preserve, through life, the happiness of your Lordships steady
confidence.
However, Murray had to wait several months after the sum
mer exhibition of the Royal Academy finished in July 1814
before it was finally delivered. Murray frequently mentions
to Byron his pride and satisfaction of having the portrait;
for example on 11 October 1822, when their relationship was
7 black Byron
watercolour on paper 11 x 15 inches
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9 don juan
watercolour on paper 15 x 11 inches
James Hogg
James Robertson
James Hogg is one of the great outsiders of our literature. Born
and bred to the hardest kind of rural life, he desperately wanted
to gain admittance to the cultural citadel that was post-En
lightenment Edinburgh, but when he did he was treated like a
barbarian, mocked for his uncouth manners and lack of criti
cal self-awareness. Even his friend and patron Sir Walter Scott
patronised him in the other, less noble sense. His social supe
riors revelled in the company of The Ettrick Shepherd, but
were always sniffing at his back for the odours of blood and
sheep shit, the very palette of Hugh Buchanans images.
At one level Hogg cared deeply what others thought of him;
at another he didnt give a damn, maintaining a good conceit
of himself: Dear Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang
to your school o chivalry? Ye are the king o that school, but
Im the king o the mountain an fairy school which is a far
higher ane nor yours. Hogg saw himself as the carrier and rep
resentative of an ancient culture which was of greater worth
and authenticity than that of the literati. In his long narrative
poem The Queens Wake (first published in 1813), the bards
of Scotland compete before a courtly audience for a prize
harp. The tenth bard, who on Ettricks mountains green /
In Natures bosom nursed had been, is clearly a self-portrait.
When he first appears:
10 hogg to murray
watercolour on paper 22 x 30 inches
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11 hogg to byron
watercolour on paper 15 x 22 inches
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12 scotts cheques
Washington Irving
Elizabeth L. Bradley
Heads will roll, the cover of the Sleepy Hollow DVD proclaims.
What Washington Irving would have made of director Tim
Burtons liberal (and liberally gory) interpretation of his most
famous story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, is anyones guess.
He might have been intrigued (he encouraged the career of a
young Edgar Allan Poe, after all), or he might have been flat
tered (Irving loved the fact that elements from his tales became
household words during his lifetime words such as Gotham,
Knickerbocker, and Rip Van Winkle not to mention the
headless horseman himself). He might have been indignant:
the protection of authorial copyright was one of his pet causes,
and as the first American writer to earn his living by his pen,
he and his British publisher and champion, John Murray
had good reason. Its possible that Irving might simply
have been confused by Burtons feverish version: the original
Legend is a jack tale a trickster story, with nary a beheading
to be found. But he would have enjoyed the romantic, spectral
gloom Burton throws over the landscape of Tarrytown, Irvings
chosen retreat on the banks of the Hudson River. Had he not
done the same thing with his depiction of the Alhambra? I
left the Alhambra on the 29th July, Irving wrote to his friend
Henry Brevoort in 1829 (note Hugh Buchanans rendering),
after having passed between two and three months there in
a kind of oriental dream. Irvings visions of Saracenic and
Gothic Spain were to serve as an introduction to that country
for generations of Americans, but he is today best remembered
for Sleepy Hollow and the other tales of the Hudson River
Valley: gentle fables that imbued the young United States with
something like a storied past. Hugh Buchanans inclusion of
a pen-and-ink sketch of the Philipsburg Manor house, long
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14 sleepy hollow
watercolour on paper 15 x 22 inches
Isabella Bird
Meg Rosoff
Crippled by Victorian ideas of womanhood (and a twisted
spine), Isabella Bird spent her early decades as an invalid,
reclining on a sofa in the home of her Yorkshire vicar father.
When (in 1854) an enlightened doctor prescribed travel, she
arose from her bed of pain and hightailed it down to the docks,
embarking on a lifetime of almost unimaginable adventure.
Tiny, fearless and blessed with a constitution of iron, Isabella
rode eight hundred miles through the Rocky Mountains on
horseback, fell in love with a notorious outlaw and wrote a
series of best-selling books to fund her travel. She explored
the remote tribal villages of Japan and Korea, filthy back
ward places where not even zealous missionaries dared to go,
endured gruelling conditions, slept in caravanserai and on the
floors of mud huts. In 1892, she became the first female fel
low of the Royal Geographical Society, and late in life, when
she could walk only with difficulty, was carried into Tibet on
a litter.
Her final travels in Japan, China and Korea during the
time of the Sino-Japanese war are here illustrated in Hugh
Buchannans vivid watercolour. This period of travel was char
acterised by conditions of great hardship and danger she was
nearly lynched by an angry mob as she travelled up the Yangtze
river but also with unprecedented access for a foreigner and
a woman, including friendship with the Korean King Gojong.
Her appetite for the ravishing wide world remained insatiable
till the day of her death.
15 isabella bird
watercolour on paper 22 x 30 inches
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execution for high treason in Summer 1916. And in July 1914 the
Strand had published his short story Danger! which bluntly
predicted extreme vulnerability amounting to likely defeat for
the UK if enemy submarine warfare cut off food supplies. The
British authorities ridiculed the idea. When war broke out, the
Germans showed much more interest and widely circulated
it in translation. Conan Doyle summoned the aid of his most
influential friend his creation Sherlock Holmes, whose War
Service appeared in the Strand in September 1917. But the
story was announced to Smith, Elder as in preparation as early
as March 1917, the evidence in the Murray archive tells us, and
the house of Murray having taken over found itself the holder
of a hot property. For despite having only seven short stories
not yet book-published Arthur Conan Doyle had determined
to vindicate himself with his war story for Holmes heading
a new volume to be entitled His Last Bow. The story itself
made a war hero and master-counterspy of Holmes. Its con
struction forced one change. As Agatha Christie made Hercule
Poirot remark in The Clocks (1963) the genius of the Holmes
stories lay in the creation of Watson, through whose eyes we
see the godlike Holmes otherwise inaccessible to us. His Last
Bow was the first whose plot required disguises not only for
Holmes and Watson but of the narrative itself. It worked: the
German spy Von Bork was foiled in the story, the UK censors
foiled because of it, and Arthur Conan Doyle won back his cre
dentials. But so urgent had been his conscription of Holmes
that Murray received copy for the book His Last Bow in May
before the short story His Last Bow received its final improve
ments, so for once it is the Strand which is the definitive text.
We used it for the Oxford Sherlock Holmes.
Osbert Lancaster
James Knox
In his post-war heyday, Osbert Lancaster was one of the fore
most artistic personalities of his generation, whose front page
pocket cartoons in Lord Beaverbrooks mighty Daily Express
entertained the nation for almost forty years, whose designs
for opera and ballet made him the toast of Covent Garden
and Glyndebourne, and whose books of light verse, memoirs,
parodies, travel and cartoons made him a constant star of Jock
Murrays spring and autumn lists.
Born in London in 1908, Osbert sprang, as he put it, from
the old upper middles of Victorian England cushioned by
commercial fortunes on both sides of the family. An educa
tion at Charterhouse and Oxford, which culminated in a
fourth class degree, fostered, on the side, his talent as an art
ist, which in turn was honed by stints at three different art
schools. Oxford, and in particular his friend John Betjeman,
also nurtured his love of architecture as well as his dandyism
characterised by flourishes inspired by La Belle Epoque such
as button holes, canes, and rakish hats.
After Oxford, Osbert worked for the influential Architectural
Review, which led to the publication by Jock Murray of Pillar
to Post, an illustrated satire on British architecture which gave
Osbert his first glimpse of fame as the inventor of amusing
new styles (which have since entered the lexicon) such as
Stockbrokers Tudor and Pont Street Dutch. Jock Murray was
to remain his publisher and the closest of friends for the rest
of Osberts life.
Of the many strands in Osberts career, Hugh Buchanan
highlights his work as a cartoonist which is reflected in the
thousands of original drawings, marked up for publication,
in the Murray archive. Osberts first pocket cartoon, indeed
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17 osbert
watercolour on paper 15 x 22 inches
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19 PADDYS PASSPORTs
watercolour on paper 22 x 30 inches
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Hugh Buchanan
HUGH BUCHANAN was born in Edinburgh in 1958. The
The Contributors
Hugh Buchanans paintings are in the collections of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, Edinburgh City Art Centre,
the University of Edinburgh, the University of Aberdeen,
the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Flemings
Bank, Deutsche Bank, the National Trust for Scotland and
the English National Trust. 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 Center, New York.
In 1994 Hugh Buchanan was given a retrospective by the
National Trust at Petworth House. 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 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 2005 his paintings featured in Watercolours
and Drawings from the Collection of Queen Elizabeth the
Queen Mother, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh
and Queens Gallery, London.
His work has featured in two limited edition publications
with accompanying texts by Peter Davidson: The Eloquence of
Shadows (1994) and Winter Light (2010).
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I S BN 9780993219528
9 780993 2 1 95 28