Talk by Robin Rodgers

Of the rich tapestry of events played out within these hallowed walls through very many centuries, one has become imprinted on the history of our little country. Surrounded as we are today by the beauty of the fabric and the gentle silence within, it is perhaps difficult to imagine this place on the 11th of May, 1559, and what followed immediately thereafter.

On the 2nd of April, 1558, Walter Milne, an aged follower of the Protestant faith in Scotland, was executed for his religion at St. Andrews. His death outraged his fellow adherents. In the Spring of 1559, Mary the Queen Regent of Scotland, and her court, ordered that the Catholic Feast of Easter a celebrated. 

When this directive was ignored by many of the Protestant followers, she summoned all Protestant preachers in Scotland to assemble before her at Stirling on the 10th of May to face trial. A large number of these men, accompanied by a significant body of peaceful and unarmed followers on route Stirling, rested a while in Perth. Amongst those summoned was John Knox, who arrived here about the 6th of May, having travelled from Geneva via Dieppe, England and Dundee.

Meanwhile, John Erskine of Dun, Provost of Montrose, and a leading Angus baron, had sought to appease the Queen Regent and persuade her to withdraw her threat.

Word reached Perth ahead of the trial date that the Queen Regent had reneged on the undertaking she had given to Erskine just these before and so the Protestants then assembled in Perth, decided to go no further against that background.

John Knox took the pulpit of this very church on the 11th of May, 1559, and preached a sermon on the sin of idolatry. The majority of those present were barons and knights from Angus and the Mearns who left the Kirk in good order and returned to their accommodation, but they were also present, ‘many from the lower classes’ as the Reverend James Scott of this Kirk tells us in his ‘History of the Lives of the Protestant Reformers’, published in 1810 – or ‘the rascal multitude’ as Knox himself termed them. Exactly what happened is open to interpretation, but suffice to say the town was already strongly sympathetic to the Protestant cause.

Within a very short space of time, the Kirk had witnessed the desecration of the many altars which were set up within and, their gander, up the rebellious multitudes spilled onto the streets of Perth and the immediate neighbourhood and continued the wanton vandalism amongst the many religious houses then extent.

By June the iconoclasts had wreaked similar havoc in Stirling and nearby Cambuskenneth and Linlithgow and finally in Edinburgh. There is, as far as I’m aware, no inventory that lists all of the artworks and other artifacts which were destroyed or spirited away in that orgy of destruction.

But we can imagine it must have been an impressive one. Given that at least 33 individual altars are recorded as being in existence in this Kirk by that date. Against such a backdrop. therefore, it is wonderful to be gathered here today surrounded by so much that is of beauty.

The Kirk, as she stands today, is largely the vision of one man and keeping with so many of the great cathedral buildings of Western Europe, which were conceived by early bishops, but much like those great edifices, St. John’s is not the work of that single visionary, but many.

Next year, 2026, marks the centenary of the reopening of the restored Kirk. It marks two, the bicentenary of the founding of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, as well as the centenary of the death of the Bengali born sculptor Finandra Nath Bose.

My talk this afternoon seeks to draw out the amazing number of connections that exist in that triumvirate. I would like to thank the friends of St. John’s Kirk of Perth for inviting me to give this talk and for humouring my suggestion that it be broadened from simply concentrating on Bose’s bronze statue of St. John the Baptist to one that includes these other connections.

I must also acknowledge the generosity of Paul Adair at Culture Perth and Kinross and to the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture for their willing permission to use images from their respective collections. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to the Galloway family in Canada, direct descendants of Finandra Nath Bose for their magnificent gift of his archive to the Royal Scottish Academy last year, and also for continuing to share personal photographs, of him from their own private collections and for granting me permission to include some of them here.

And so to our venue this afternoon. In 1918 it was approved that the often talked about restoration of St John’s Kirk be put into effect as a memorial to the men of Perth and Perthshire who had served their country in the time of the Great War in which too many had been maimed or mentally scarred or lost. The plan was to carry out an extensive refurbishment of the mother Church of Perth, removing the internal partitions and galleries in the process and returning it to as near as possible its original cruciform floor plan. The cost was put at £50,000 to be raised by public subscription work commenced on site in 1923.

As early as 1598 the interior had been divided to form two separate churches, effectively the old church and the new or little church which was created in the western end of the nave. In 1773, a further division created three churches known as the West, middle and East. It had been proposed in 1889 to address this latest round of iconoclasm and restore the Kirk to something akin to her original internal layout, but it came to nothing. Minor works were carried out about 1894. The 1923 plan finally achieved this.

In 1829 in a report on the fabric commissioned by the Kirk session of the West Church, the architect whom may engaged, condemned the building as unsafe. The Perth presbytery sought a second opinion and approached William Henry Playfair, an early architect member of the fledgling Scottish Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Playfair, the architect of the Royal Institution Building in the Mound in Edinburgh, better known as the RSA building and subsequently of the National Gallery Building adjacent amongst an impressive portfolio of commissions, acknowledged that the walls were indeed off the perpendicular in places but were secure and posed no threat of collapse.

As a brief aside, Playfair may not however have been the first elected member of the Royal Scottish Academy to be associated with St. John’s Kirk of Perth. On the 4th of June, 1802, David Octavius Hill from nearby Watergate, in East Church Parish, was probably baptized in the church. And in 1811 the portrait painter, John McLaren Barclay, who was born at the Salutation Hotel in South Street, where his father was ‘mein host’, may also have been baptized within these walls.

But back to the fabric, when it came to affecting the 1923 renovations, the architect then appointed Sir Robert Lorimer took no chances and significant parts of the interior were dismantled, stone by stone, secure foundations provided and the whole faithfully rebuilt. Lorimer was another of our architect members he had made his name with, with the Thistle Chapel at St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh and his work in Perth coincided with him starting work also on the restoration of Paisley Abbey and on the creation of the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle, the latter having been beset with internal bickering since the scheme was first approved in 1919. 

His first major commission, however, had been the restoration of a private house, the 16th century Earlshall near Leuchars in Fife. In 1890, the castle was purchased by Robert W Mackenzie who engaged Lorimer. Mackenzie was a member of the original Perthshire Art Association and also had a special connection to St. John’s, which may have played a part in Lorimer receiving the commission here because Mackenzie’s father-in-law, the Reverend Dr. Robert Milton, had served as the minister of the West Church from 1857 until his death in May, 1895 and he is commemorated in the Great West window above the Kirks main entrance.

Mr. Mackenzie gifted that window designed by Herbert Hendry in 1926. An incredibly talented individual. Lorimer cannot but have been aware of the major five volume study, the Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland by David McGibbon and Thomas Ross and the pair’s slightly later three volume Ecclesiastical Architecture of Scotland published between the 1896 and 1897.

Ross, the younger of the two was born close to here in Errol and served as MacGibbon’s apprentice before joining him as a partner in their own architectural practice. Their studies were groundbreaking and illustrated by Ross’s, carefully executed and measured line drawings.

McGibbon and Ross’s work coincided with and in many respects initiated a revival of interest in Scottish architecture of the past, much of which had been disfigured or lost completely. The advent of the railways and an awareness in the part of local government of the serious health risks posed by areas of poor housing have both contributed to an at times ruthless disregard for this aspect of our cultural history.

Ross, too, was an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy, and amongst the many churches featured in the Gibbon and Ross’s later work in St. John’s Kirk of Perth. Lorimer was therefore not only well grounded in architectural propriety, but is remarkable also for his recognition of the importance of the tradition of craft.

Lorimer gathered around him a veritable army of highly skilled craft workers whom he would employ on many of his major projects. It is not uncommon for architects and sculptors to work in partnership in buildings or in monuments. War memorials in places of worship, for example, are two primaries where such partnerships can be found.

Fairly early in the First World War, the rate of British and allied casualties reached unimaginable numbers. The British government directed that the bodies of the fallen would not be repatriated but would lie in the lands where they had fought and died. In time, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission would be created to regiment the military cemeteries. Architects, including another of our honorary members, Sir Edmond Lutyens, would be engaged to design these species, introducing symbolism to the layout and associated structures. And in recognition of enormous visceral need for the mourning families back home in Scotland as elsewhere in the in the United Kingdom, to have a focus for their grief, a war advisory committee was established.

The Duke of Atholl was a driving force in this initiative and the committee was vested in the Royal Scottish Academy. It served as a means of ensuring a degree of decorum and aesthetic to the numerous war memorials which sprang up across the parishes of Scotland in the decade following the armistice of November, 1918. In the event many of the architects and sculptors who were recommended to local bodies who sought to erect memorials were themselves members of the Academy.

One such was a relatively young man who’d been born in Bengal on the 2nd of March, 1888, Finandra Nath Bose. 100 years ago, almost to the day it was actually yesterday, the 18th of March, 1925, Bose was elected an associate member of the Royal Scottish Academy; the first Asian to receive such an honour and the first Indian born artist to be recognized by any art institution in Britain.

Educated in Calcutta, Bose came to Europe to further his studies, but failed to find an opening in in Italy as he had hoped. He found himself in Edinburgh at the age of just 16 and there he was successfully admitted to study sculpture at the Edinburgh School of Art from 1905-1908 under the tutelage of the English born Percy Portsmouth, who was quick to recognize his young charge’s, innate aptitude for his subject.

Bose was in the last group of students to attend the Edinburgh School of Art, and in 1908 moved as one of the first cohort of students to the newly opened Edinburgh College of Art.

Portsmouth was appointed the college’s first Head of Sculpture and also became one of our academicians while still a student Bose’s hard work accepted for inclusion in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy Summer exhibitions in London where he attracted the attention of the Welsh sculptor, Sir William Goscombe John, a academician who became an early patron.

In 1911 while still at college, Bose was awarded a post diploma year and spent several months in Paris before moving on to Rome in 1912. He spent a great deal of time sketching freestanding sculpture in museums as well as public statues and architectural carvings in situ. These he executed whilst in Paris in the grounds of the Palace in Versailles, in the Louvre museum and at the Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air which was then housed in the Trocadéro and in the Vatican when he was in Rome. His interests included classical statuary, medieval ecclesiastical carvings, as well as the work of the more recent Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.

Amongst the surviving drawings from these travels are at least two, which feature the work of Auguste Rodin. Indeed Bose and Rodin actually met, with Rodin, taking a great interest in the work of the younger man and giving him encouragement.

Rodin’s archive contains many visiting cards, including several from Percy Port’smouth, but whether he facilitated the meeting for his star student is not known. Rodin was to prove especially influential on Bose’s development. Through Gascombe John Bose was contacted by his Highness Sayajirao Gaekwad III, the Maharaja of Baroda. He was the third most influential Maharaja in India at the time and was generally of a liberal and progressive disposition seeking to improve the living conditions, education and life opportunities of his subjects.

In 1915, the Maharaja appointed Bose as his personal sculptor and commissioned him to make a series of life-sized bronze figure sculptures for his palace gardens. The earliest of these were exhibited at the RSA and were cast in bronze in Edinburgh.

Although the figures are clearly modelled on native characters, they owe their pose and general appearance to the influence of Rodin in particular, they appear to be captured in the process of movement as though they have just arrived and are and are already on their way to leaving.

In this Bose is marked out as a leading figure in the development of a modernist Eurocentric tendency in Indian sculpture.

Back in Edinburgh, where he had established himself in his own studio in the Dean Village, Bose was engaged with carefully modelled and generally small scale figurative groups in bronze, which he continued to exhibit.

He married a Dundee woman and owned a small cottage northwest of Alyth to which he would retire to relax at his favourite pastime, fly fishing. Bose is also known to have designed at least four war memorials, three of which definitely came to fruition.

His earliest was a rather simple bronze panel with palm fronds  in low relief framing the names of eighty employees of the Edinburgh Brewers, William Younger & Co. Ltd, which was cast at a cost of £80 and originally erected at the firm’s Holyrood brewery.

This was followed by the standing figure of a naked youth arms outstretched and titled ‘The Sacrifice of Youth’. This was set on top of a column which forms the war memorial in the East Lothian village of Ormiston. The figure is heavily inspired by Rodin’s age of bronze, which poses known to have not only seen but also sketched whilst in Paris,

But by far his largest, most impressive and best known work is the life-size bronze of St. John the Baptist, which graces the wall beside us.

Sadly, Bose died before the piece was installed in the Kirk in September, 1926. Two months before the restored church was reopened for public worship.

It was cast in Edinburgh by the firm of Charles Henshaw & Son, the leading architectural bronze founders in the city, and one hopes that Bose was able to be present at some stage in that process.

It has long been believed that this is Bose’s soul work in St. John’s. However, a photograph in the archives of the Rose Scottish Academy and an entry in the catalog for the Academy’s annual exhibition in 1926, suggests that the entire war Memorial shrine to the left of which the bronze of St. John stands may in fact also be by Bose.

Lorimer  must have been aware of Bose through his exhibits and the generally close knit artistic community in Edinburgh and as early as 1924 had commissioned him to undertake this particular part of the refurbishment scheme.

Bose exhibiting his design for one of the beautifully stylized angels, which flanked at the RSA that year. The designs are clearly Bose’s own, but it is interesting to note that on the outer wall of the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle on which Lorimer was working simultaneously to his work here, a pair of angels holding an memorial shield between them and with similar stylized wings stretching vertically behind them.

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Those at the Castle, the work of Alice Meredith Williams who also worked here at John’s, and it would be tempting to think that she’d based them on Bose’s own designs. The shrine is built into an old archway which was revealed, during Lorimer’s restoration, when the galleries above were removed.

Although designed by Bose, sadly, it is unclear as to who exactly was responsible for the carving and colouring we see today. As has been mentioned earlier, Lorimer was unique amongst his peers in the strength and skill base of those craftsmen and women he assembled to assist him in his major commissions. A contemporary of Bose at Edinburgh College of Art, Charles d’Orville Pilkington Jackson, who would later make his name as the sculptor of the equestrian bronze figure at Bannockburn of Robert the Bruce, who incidentally in 1328 had ordered an early phase of rebuilding here at St. John’s, undertook much of the stone carving in Lorimer’s projects including and colouring. He may have been responsible for these aspects of the memorial shrine. The royal arms above, although  shown in Bose’s plaster maquette for the shrine, may also have been designed by another of Lorimer’s band of craftspeople, John R Sutherland. 

Sutherland was the leading heraldic artistof the day and had also designed the diploma of the Edinburgh College of Art where he was engaged as a lecturer for several years. Indeed, there are interesting similarities between the kneeling angels at the top of the diploma and the carved angels who flank the Scottish Saltire above the carved inscription panel of the Memorial Shrine. Regardless, the war Memorial Shrine stands as an apt memorial to the gifted young Indian who designed it as much as to those who commemorates.

As mentioned earlier, Bose’s favourite pastime was fly fishing. In August, 1926, he was holidaying on a farm near Peebles on a fishing trip, with a friend, when he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was just 38 years of age and undoubtedly on the cusp of great things.

Bose was buried in Liberton Cemetery, Lorimer and Pilkington Jackson being amongst the large turnout of mourners. His grave remained unmarked until 2013 when a modest marker was placed on it by the Edinburgh sculptor and Bose admirer, Kenny Munro (who was in the audience this afternoon).

Earlier I made reference to Bose’s studio being in the Dean Village where he was surrounded by a number of other artists and sculptors. One of these who opened a stained glass studio in the village in 1949. Some years after Bose’s death was William Wilson. The same year Wilson, who had made his name as both a print maker and a watercolourist was elected a full academician of the academy. Wilson is known to have designed over 300 stained glass windows, and these are to be found as farfield as Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the Republic of Ireland and England, though the majority are in Scotland.

Indeed Wilson’s single most extensive stained glass scheme is to be found right here in Perth. It is not well known and is unusual in being almost wholly abstract in its design, comprising 44 square panels, they illuminate the west and east walls of Saint Mary Magdalene’s Roman Catholic Church on Glenearn Road  in Craigie.

But closer to home, amongst the rich tapestry of stained glass here within St. John’s are no fewer than two windows designed by Wilson. These both predate his scheme at St. Mary Magdalene’s. The earlier of these is that unveiled by the late queen mother on the 26th of August, 1955, and is the memorial window to those of the Sixth Battalion, the Black Watch who lost their lives during the Second World War. The Queen Mother was the Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment at the time of the unveiling. 

Behind figures in full dress uniform and battle dress are the supporting figures of the Archangel Michael in the left light and St. Andrew in the right, the richly coloured dragon representing the forces of evil spans both lights and links them together.

Slightly closer to the west door is the second of Wilson’s windows here dedicated the 1956 to the memory of its donor, Miss Eliza Jane McNab depicting since Nicholas and Christopher. Interestingly, Miss McNab was not a member of St. John’s but that shared that vision of seeking to enhance its fabric.

Another of our academicians who established his reputation as a nature and watercolourist a generation ahead of Wilson was Sir David Young Cameron. But for a twist of fate he could have been born in Perth, but his father, the Reverend Robert Cameron, spent four years as assistant to the minister of the North Kirk, then in the original church, on the same site as the present building, which was erected in 1880 in Mill Street. Indeed, Sir David was named after that man, the Reverend David Young.

A year younger than Lorimer, Cameron was born in June, 1865 in Glasgow where his father had accepted a call to preach. D. Y. Cameron himself was destined for a life in the ministry, like his elder brother, but opted instead to pursue an artistic career and, after studying in Glasgow, he enrolled as a student in the RSA Life School.

Cameron was a key figure in the etching revival and enjoyed many honours during his busy life. He was engaged as an official war artist to record aspects of the First World war and as amongst the select band who have been elected to both the Royal Academy in London and the Royal Scottish Academy amongst several other artistic organizations. Indeed on the resignation of Sir James Guthrie as the president of the RSA in 1919, it was to Cameron that the membership to a man turned to replace him. It was an office which Cameron would’ve been more than able, suited, but one to which he felt unable to devote the time it required and so, to the disappointment of many, he declined.

Cameron shared many of Lorimer’s aspirations like him. He recognized the importance not only of quality architecture, but especially of the importance of enhancing places of worship. To this, he devoted a significant part of his life, traveling the country to advise and support local congregations in their endeavors.

His own masterpiece in this regard is the parish church in the village of Kippen and Stirlingshire where he settled and spent much of his life. Under his drive, the 19th century building was refurbished and beautified with wood carving iron work, specially designed furniture and fittings, and stained glass windows, including by Herbert Hendry, who designed the majority of the windows here. Alongside his wife, Lady Cameron, he also gifted various pieces of contemporary sculpture to adorn its interior. The major restoration at Kippen was carried out almost contemporaneously with St. John’s between 1924 and 1926.

On Friday the 14th of September, 1945, Cameron arrived in Perth in the company of two of his younger sisters. That evening he attended the opening of an exhibition of watercolour paintings in the art gallery. He spent much of the following Saturday applying colour to the carved panels in the pulpit and the communion table here in St. John’s. I’ve never come across any reference that suggests that Cameron was either the designer or the carver of these panels. Thecarving more likely being the work of the Clow brothers, and it is, but it the colouring is certainly Cameron’s intervention.

On the Sunday, he attended both morning and evening services in the Kirk giving an address at the latter prophetically titled as it was, as it would turn out, ‘A Cry from the Heart. This addressed a theme he had tackled in the many talks he had given around the country, looking at how church interiors could be enhanced through the judicious application and inclusion of art.

At the close of the service, Cameron and his sisters returned to the Royal George Hotel, where they were staying. As they climbed the steps and entered the lobby, Cameron suffered cardiac arrest and died almost immediately.

In tribute to this true gentleman, the communion table has been left unfinished exactly as he left it on his last day on earth.

My talk commenced with reference to the events that took place in this place on the 11th of May, 1559, and in many ways, Cameron’s contribution brings that story full circle. What the rascal multitude caused to destroy successive individuals of more considerate outlook have sought to replace. The pulpit behind me has been reinstated by Lorimer in the exact place is the one from which John Knox had preached back in May, 1559, but which was subsequently destroyed. And the communion table now sits at the east end of the Kirk within a space created and the plans drawn up by another of our architect members, Ian Gordon Lindsey and named the John Knox Chapel.

Lindsay was born in Edinburgh and like Lorimer was well versed in Scottish vernacular architecture, an interest he had first displayed whilst attending boarding school in Crieff, he was originally articled to yet another of our architect members, Reginald Fairley. The architect incidentally responsible for the restoration of Kippen Parish Church. Like Lorimer,, Lindsey had also secured a number of prestigious commissions prior to his involvement at Perth. These included extensive work in the quaint villages of Culross and Falkland for the National Trust of for Scotland, as well as various ecclesiastical works of which his restoration of Iona Abbey stands as his greatest achievement.

In his short life, he was just 66 when he died. Lindsay wrote and published extensively on both vernacular and ecclesiastical architecture, including a pioneering reference work on Scotland’s cathedrals.

He was also fundamentally involved in surveying and categorizing buildings in over 100 Scottish towns and villages during the 1930s, and which formed the basis for the creation of the register of listed buildings in 1947.

The following year, 1948, the Kirk Session of St. John’s agreed to create the Knox Chapel as a memorial to the members of the congregation who had lost their lives in the Second World War thus balancing Bose’s war Memorial Shrine to the victims of the First. Lindsey was commissioned to draw the plans.

It took until 1955 for the Knox Chapel to be dedicated and subsequent additions were made to it by Lindsay’s former business partner Schomberg Scott. Like Finandra Nath Bose, who was raised a Hindu. Lindsay was not a member of the Church of Scotland. He had been raised in the Episcopalian faith.

Their involvement here proving that art unites those of all faiths and none. In continuation of the Academy’s involvement with its important place, the wrought iron and leathern lectern of 1970 on the chancel’s steps behind me carries on its front a metal relief by George Wiley, who was elected to the RSA in 2005 and is an unusual work in his total output.

Other of our painter and sculptor members have also served over the years as advisors on matters artistic to the Trust for St. John’s. These have included the Perth born sculptor, Alistair R Ross, RSA, and the recent past President Arthur J. Watson, who has been resident in the Fair City for many years.

And I’d like to end by saying that to all these persons of vision, may we give thanks for their talents and all sucker to those who continue to cherish and care for this magnificent place.

Robin Rodgers graduated in Art History from University of St Andrews in 1983. His took his diploma in Art Gallery Museum studies at the University of Manchester in 1984. The next 26 years we spent in Perth Museum and Art Gallery. 

Since 2013, Robin’s been a Documentation Officer with the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, the RSA. He’s a keen researcher, has lectured, and has published widely on Perthshire artists. He has been engaged in a research project leading aspects of print and printmaking in Scotland.