Like so many other organisations we are closing until the end of June and, as soon as we can, we will let everyone know about the decisions we make for the summer programme for July and beyond.
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The kitchens at Hospitalfield have been very busy. Our chef Simon has drawn together a small team of volunteer chefs to cook food for those who most need it at this difficult time. We have struck up a partnership wither Angus Council’s Children, Families and Social Justice Department who are distributing the meals and we are really grateful to the people of Arbroath who have been so responsive to the Takeaway Wednesday nights. It is the income from these Takeaway Nights that has made it possible for us to cover the cost of the free meals. We expect this to continue in to August or until the schools return.
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Austin Clare Cooper (1890-1964) arrived at Hospitalfield in 1906 when he was just sixteen years old. He was offered one of the first scholarships at the newly established Art School in Arbroath where he studied for four years, leaving in 1910. It was the teaching of George Harcourt that this young artists would have been attracted to as he joined the residential undergraduate course alongside his ten fellow students.
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This 19th century idealised female figure with its white marble surface dominates the Picture Gallery at Hospitalfield. Standing on an oval shaped marble pedestal which accommodates the figure and the tree stump upon which leans, Clytie, looks down on us from her perch, her long hair tied up loosely at the back. This sad moral tale from classical myth suited the mood of the 19th century and the American artist William Henry Rinehart (1825-1874) who lived in Rome from 1858, created several versions of this sculpture to celebrate this desperate love story, one is held at The Met Museum in New York, and another is displayed at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
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In an unassuming edition of The Pleasures of Hope & other poems by Scottish poet Thomas Campbell held at the Library at Hospitalfield, is an inscription written in the hand of Elizabeth Fraser that reveals a turbulent story of the erasure of an ill-fated marriage. On the flyleaf we can see how she has tried to scratch out her married name ‘Baker’.
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The Library at Hospitalfield is home to a collection of 21 maps all dating to the 18th-century. Fourteen of them have been bound together in one folio volume and another six were found folded up and tucked in the back of the folio. The folio originally contained more maps but unfortunately these have disappeared over the years.
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The elegant simplicity of this small, highly glazed, fine brown cup hides its rich history. It is a form known as capuchin, a shape developed for drinking coffee and hot chocolate. These were the new luxurious commodities of the 17th-century, a fashion that inspired the invention of the coffee shop, a place for debate and political ferment fuelled by sugar and caffeine.
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The plaster casts at Hospitalfield sit on polished tables or are propped up on mantelpieces but most are in store. They are more than simply interesting decorative objects, they tell their own unique story of the nature and direction of art education in the 19th-century and they evocatively furnish the story of the early days of the ‘experiment’; a vision for a new Art school in Arbroath, established in 1901.
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We know that Arbroath was home of many innovations in the 19th and early 20th centuries and astronomy was one of the areas of interest where the town led in enquiry and study; Hospitalfield and Patrick Allan-Fraser was always present and part of the conversation.
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The collections of paintings at Hospitalfield were formed by Patrick Allan-Fraser as a didactic collection that would serve his quite wide ranging vision for Hospitalfield after his death. His idea for the legacy was somewhere between the academy and the museum, a combination of the two. A place where art can be viewed and also made, where learning was central to the experience of being in this place; learning through conventional teaching and learning through the process of doing.
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