The weather has been positively gorgeous on the East coast of Scotland these last few days and Jamie and I have been taking advantage of it by taking lovers' walks on the beach. That is wholly unrelated to the rest of this post, but I felt like I should share this photo with you for two reasons: 1) It's a great view of the town from the west sands and 2) my hair is amazing.
Anyways, my Culture and Society in Modern Scotland module took a trip to Edinburgh yesterday to visit the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. I was over the moon about this field trip and spent close to two hours trailing behind our professor listening to his detailed analysis of each painting in the Scottish collection.
I am ashamed to say that I had never been to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery despite many trips to Edinburgh and countless hours spent in the nearby National Gallery. The Portrait Gallery is tucked away at the far end of the New Town in an austere looking building, but entry is free and there is an excellent cafe so now you have no excuse. Our professor gave us 45 minutes to explore on our own so I wandered haphazardly through the gallery looking for furniture (as ya do), and stumbled up on a reading room filled with books about Scotland. No one else was there so I sat down and thumbed through a few coffee table books on Scottish royalty when a smaller book caught my eye entitled Great Houses of Scotland. I quickly reached for it in what can only be described as a deeply Pavlovian response (Houses? Furniture? Salivaaaa) and flipped through looking for places I knew had great collections. It wasn't a particularly thorough book, so for the purposes of killing more time I turned back to the front and read the introduction.
It read: "There was a time when there was real concern that Scotland's houses and their contents were doomed. After the Second World War, with the country still meagerly rationed and highly taxed, the prognosis was bleak indeed... most of the great collections have survived the last fifty years, if not intact, at least in reasonably good health... The Furniture History Society and the specialist teaching at the University of St Andrews, in particular, have brought a higher level of scholarship to the study of the wonderful collections of native and continental furniture."
Hooray! My life is affirmed; my academic pursuits justified! I went downstairs and bought the book from the shop on the spot. Good on you, David Jones, and good on St Andrews!
In other news, how is it already Wednesday? I need to do some work in a bad way.
