Old Edinburgh at Night by Arthur Melville ARSA RSW (1855

Old Edinburgh at Night

Arthur Melville ARSA RSW (1855–1904)

1883

Watercolour and bodycolour with gum Arabic

27 x 20 inches; 68.6 x 50.8 cm.

Signed, dated and inscribed / 83 / ‘Old Edinburgh’

Provenance: Private Collection

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Commentary by Kenneth McConkey

Thought to represent unidentified buildings in the area around the Lawnmarket in the ‘Old Town’, the present Edinburgh nocturne is one of Melville’s most evocative early watercolours. This particular area of the city was notorious for its low taverns and baudy houses – some of which dated back two or three centuries. It was in effect, the Scots equivalent of Dickens’ Wapping. The visual challenge in this potentially hostile environment lay in capturing fleeting effects – figures emerging from, or retreating into pools of darkness around a single street lamp. It comes just five years after the famous Whistler/Ruskin libel suit – initially prompted by the exhibition of a seemingly incomprehensible night scene, set in Cremorne Gardens, Chelsea, a pleasure park of ill repute. Melville must have been aware of the controversy this trial occasioned, even though he was abroad when it was being talked about. For many young artists of his generation, the American expatriate was an heroic figure, and in his ‘nocturnes’ of the Thames at Battersea Reach, he was the standard bearer of artistic freedom.

If this unusual nocturne at first calls Whistler to mind, it also acts as a forerunner for many of the later night scenes by James Watson Herald. However, of greater significance perhaps, is the obvious resonance its gaunt dilapidated edifices intone with the seedy tenements of James Pryde’s imagined Edinburgh at the turn of the twentieth century. In the city’s visual history, Old Edinburgh is an important moment.

References

MacKay, Agnes Ethel. Arthur Melville, Scottish Impressionist, 1855–1904. London: F. Lewis Publishers, 1951.

McConkey, Kenneth. Lavery and the Glasgow Boys. Exhibition Catalogue. Clandeboye, County Down: The Ava Gallery; Edinburgh: Bourne Fine Art; London: The Fine Art Society, 2013. No. 3.

Last modified 4 October 2011