A number of Scottish houses and castles built between 1540 and 1640 have painted ceilings. This is a distinctive national style, though there is common ground with similar work elsewhere, especially in France, Spain and Scandinavia.[1] Most surviving examples are painted simply on the boards and joists forming the floor of the room above. Rooms or galleries in attic storeys were fully lined with thin pine boarding and painted. The fashion was superseded by decorative plasterwork and sometimes the painted ceilings were broken up to form lathing for the new plaster.
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The paint used employed protein size with chalk and pigments, including natural ochres, vermilion, and orpiment often mixed with indigo to form vibrant greens.[2] The pine timber was imported from Norway. The names of many painters have been found in contemporary records, but as yet no painter of any particular surviving ceiling has been identified through archival research. However, it is recorded that in 1554, Edinburgh painters led by Walter Binning assaulted an ousider, David Warkman, who had been painting a ceiling.[3] It appears that only the wealthiest of the merchant classes and aristocrats could afford this decoration, though the picture is unbalanced as more modest interiors do not survive.
The largest group of these ceilings have patterns of fruit and flowers, and may perhaps have evoked tapestry borders. Some ceilings in galleries at the top of buildings incorporated vignettes with biblical or emblematic scenes. Others employ Renaissance grotesque ornament including symbolic emblems. A gallery in a demolished building on Edinburgh's Castlehill had scenes of the Apocalypse and Christ asleep in a storm, set in the Forth valley.[4] Fragments survive in storage at the National Museums of Scotland.[5] Ceilings painted with rows of heraldic shields included; the gallery at Earlshall and Collairnie Castle, Fife, a ceiling at Linlithgow High Street,[6] and Nunraw House, East Lothian.
Several surviving examples can be seen in Edinburgh; including John Knox's House, Gladstone's Land, and the Canongate Tollbooth museum. The birthroom at Edinburgh Castle was painted by James Anderson to commemorate the fiftieth birthday of James VI, and restored by Walter Melville in 1693.[7] Gladstone's Land dating from 1619 also has relatively well preserved decoration on plaster contemporary with the ceiling. More extensive domestic mural painting survives at Kinneil House, dating from the 1550s, and painted for the Regent Arran, who employed Walter Binning on some of his projects.[8] Aberdour Castle, Fife, has one of latest ceilings c.1633, and Huntingtower Castle the earliest c.1540. Ceilings at Crathes Castle are decorated with the Nine Worthies and the Muses. As at Crathes, beams at Traquair House and Sailor's Walk, Kirkcaldy, carry proverbial and biblical admonitions, written in Middle Scots. A gallery at Provost Skene's House, Aberdeen, is similar in format to the Castlehill painting,[9] St. Mary's, Grandtully, and the Skelmorlie Aisle, Largs, signed by John Stalker, are painted on thin lining boards. Culross Palace, built by Sir George Bruce of Carnock, has a variety of painted interiors including suites of emblems,[10] geometric patterns and biblical scenes.
Other ceilings remain in private buildings, and a number of ceilings were salvaged and stored by Historic Scotland including two from Dysart, Fife. The National Museum of Scotland displays a ceiling from Rossend Castle Burntisland, Fife,[11] and a screen from Wester Livilands, near Stirling.[12] Stirling Smith Museum and Art Gallery has a ceiling from Robert Drummond of Carnock's house. A room from Alexander Seton, 1st Earl of Dunfermline's house at Pinkie is displayed at Edinburgh's Huntley House Museum. Painted beams from Midhope Castle were moved to Abbey Strand Edinburgh, and a ceiling from Prestongrange House is at Napier University though these last two are not regularly open to the public. Two rooms in the Missoni Hotel in Edinburgh still have painted ceilings from the original early seventeenth century tenement building. Painted ceilings concealed by later plasterwork continue to be discovered: another ceiling in Edinburgh was discovered in 2010.[13]
Some of the ceilings include pictures or emblems based on European printed books. Prestongrange's ceiling has comic figures from Richard Breton's Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, Paris (1565).[14] Other ornament came from 17 engravings after Hans Vredeman de Vries called the Grottesco, printed by Gerard de Jode in Antwerp (1565-71), and another set the Caryatidum depicting architectural 'terms' - load bearing figures. The ceiling is dated 1581 and at that time complimented a sideboard gifted by Esmé Stuart.[15] At Rossend, emblems by Claude Paradin,[16] Gabriele Simeoni and Alciato were used, again with ornamental detail from Vredeman de Vries's Grottesco. Emblems at Culross Palace were adapted from A Choice of Emblems by Geffrey Whitney, London (1586). The tiny engravings made by the French goldsmith Etienne Delaune supplied the ornament at the Skelmorlie Aisle. Amongst the sources used at Pinkie were de Vries's Perspectiva, (1605), Otto van Veen's Emblemata Horatiana, Antwerp (1607), and Denis de Lebey de Batilly's Emblemata, Frankfurt (1596). These demonstrate the use of renaissance pattern books by painters and patrons in Scotland, and coupled with copious classical quotations, the wealth and topicality of the library of Alexander Seton.[17]
There are no contemporary references to this type of decoration. Most examples were concealed behind later interiors or neglected in buildings which became lower status accommodation. In the early nineteenth century antiquarian interest was kindled by discovery during the demolition of buildings in Edinburgh and Dundee. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe and Rev. Sime rescued a part of the Apocalypse painting from Edinburgh's Castlehill and made a series of coloured record drawings now held by the Royal Commission (RCAHMS). Daniel Wilson described the ceiling at length in his Memorials of Edinburgh. At the end of the century, Andrew Lyons, artist and antiquarian, made drawings of a number of ceilings (also in RCAHMS), and published articles in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, Scotland, PSAS.
In the first half of twentieth century conservation works were led by John Houston of the Ministry of Works. Ian Hodkinson, a conservator, and Michael R Apted, an inspector of ancient monuments, were instrumental in the rescue and salvage of a number of painted ceilings, published in Apted's 1966 monograph, and a series of PSAS articles. Apted made an exhaustive search of archive references to painting for his Edinburgh PhD, and this formed the basis for his collaboration with Susan Hannabuss on Painters in Scotland: A Biographical Dictionary published in 1978. John Cornforth admired the contribution of the Stenhouse Conservation Centre as antiquarian and romantic.[18] More recently, Michael Bath, emeritus professor of English, Strathclyde University, has re-assessed the corpus with a particular focus on the emblems used and their origins and meanings to the Scottish patrons. Bath has published a number of articles and a detailed illustrated 2003 monograph exploring sources with a useful comprehensive inventory of examples both extant and destroyed. Ailsa Murray's 2009 article explores conservation methods.