Ramsay Garden Frescoes

Brief Information

The cycle about wind music in Patrick Geddes's drawing room ended not with an image, but with a real small organ. Because of this, the Ramsay Garden frescoes are read not as separate pictures on the walls, but as a constructed environment: the painting, the room, and the object inside the room worked together. John Duncan created these cycles in the 1890s in two interiors of the Edinburgh quarter: in Geddes's apartment and in the common hall of Ramsay Lodge, a university residence.

The first cycle, about the development of wind music from myth to Scottish history, has been lost. The second, Celtic one has been relatively well preserved: seven early frescoes remain in the hall, which is now part of a private apartment. Later Duncan added five more paintings with symbolic portraits of people of the modern age, and the mythological hall turned into a story about Scottish memory and knowledge.

What to Notice First

It makes sense to look at the frescoes as a sequence, not as a set of scenes. The lost musical cycle moved in a procession along the four walls of the drawing room: from the reed and Pan to pipers and the organ. This principle also helps to understand the Celtic hall: the figures there do not simply illustrate legends, but place myth, learning, religion, and history side by side.

In the Celtic cycle, frames and flatness are especially important. The ornamental frames of Celtic knots are now known only from reproductions, but they are precisely what show the connection with the aesthetics of medieval manuscripts. In "The Finding of Excalibur," the action is transferred to Edinburgh's Duddingston Loch, and the figures stand almost motionless, like a decorative pattern. In "The Combat of Fingal," the movement is stronger: stylized flowers, pine branches, and a harpist appear alongside the fight. In this way, the heroic scene remains part of the overall decorative order.