Art lovers have been admiring some of Aberdeen’s top works – more than 600 miles away.
Aberdeen Art Gallery is currently closed for a £30million refurbishment, and is not due to reopen until 2017.
In the meantime, some of the 130-year-old building’s treasures have been dispersed across the UK and even further afield to ensure they can still be admired by arts enthusiasts.
And visitors to Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery, on the Sussex coast, have so far been delighted with the collection of 36 pictures on display as part of a clever and engaging exhibition titled North to South.
Sara Cooper, head of collections at Towner, got wind of the shutdown at Aberdeen through the UK gallery grapevine.
She said: “I thought they would put their stuff in store as we had done in a similar situation. But Aberdeen were keen to loan out their pictures.
“Two years ago on a trip to a gallery in Shetland, I returned via Aberdeen and put the nucleus of our North South show in motion.”
Her main interest was what she called “the Sussex connection” – several paintings from Aberdeen Art Gallery figure in the equation.
Not least those of Duncan Grant. His oil painting The Glade, Firle Park, one of the Towner’s pictures, hangs alongside The Barn at the Pond lent from Aberdeen.
The artist – grandson of the laird of Rothiemurchus – lived with fellow Bloomsbury group member Vanessa Bell, and their relationship was the centre of a recent TV drama series Life in Squares.
There are Bell pairings in the same room at the Towner exhibition, including an oil painting named Still Life, from Schoolhill.
Another connection is Joan Eardley, born in Sussex, who attended Glasgow Art School in which city she painted her famous pictures of tenement children in the Townhead district.
She subsequently lived at Catterline, near Stonehaven, where she painted wild seascapes. Two examples of her work are on loan to the museum, High Tide and Winter Sea IV.
Newburgh artist James McBey has two Sussex scenes from 1937, also on loan from Aberdeen.
And fellow Scots Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun also feature, with four of their modernist oils taking up one wall – the latter’s Woman in Green and Woman and Goat, and two of MacBryde’s undated Still Lifes, one from Aberdeen, the other from the Towner.
