Reflections: The light and life of John Henry Lorimer

In this first exhibition of John Henry Lorimer (1856-1936), curators Charlotte Lorimer and David Patterson present his reflections of light, identity, family, femininity and home. Each theme introduces an additional focus for the paintings, objects and letters on display, some of which have never been exhibited before.

For the curators, all five of these themes are represented by The Flight of the Swallows (1906), a beloved painting for many visitors to The City Art Centre. The painting may have been inspired by the departure of the artist’s sister Alice and her children following a summer at Kellie Castle in Fife. Like the swallows, Alice and her family would have faced a September voyage south, away from Scotland and back to Guyana, where her husband lived and worked. The quote from author Victor Hugo, embedded in the frame, is translated as: ‘Oh it is sad to see the swallows flee! They go towards the golden South.’

Seven years ago, The Flight of the Swallows sparked a conversation between The City Art Centre and The Lorimer Society, an organisation that preserves and promotes the art of the Lorimer family. It is from this conversation that Reflections: The Light and Life of John Henry Lorimer has developed. The exhibition brings together almost fifty works of art and seeks to tell their stories, bringing the brilliance of John Henry Lorimer to light.

The audioguide for Reflections: The light and life of John Henry Lorimer is presented and produced by the exhibition co-curator, Charlotte Lorimer. It includes the panels of text displayed in the exhibition, as well as dramatised readings of family letters and memoirs, performed by Clive Russell, George Lorimer, Ed Wade, Natasha Jobst and Sarah Haynes. The audioguide also includes twelve original poems by Christine de Luca. The exhibition runs from 6th November 2021 to 20th March 2022 at The City Art Centre in Edinburgh.

Throughout his life, John Henry Lorimer sought to represent the clarity and diversity of light. His first watercolour, painted in 1864 when he was eight years old, pictured Kinghorn Loch. The sketch has since been lost. But his choice to represent a Fife landscape, possibly including an Autumn sky reflected in water, anticipates many of his future works of art. The painting was the first of hundreds inspired by the light and landscape of Fife, a county surrounded by sea on three sides.

John Henry was almost twenty-one when his family stumbled upon Kellie Castle, empty but for the birds nesting in its crumbling walls and chimney pots. Dandelions and nettles pushed up through the floorboards. Not a pane of glass remained in its tall, elegant windows and many of the tiles on the steep, sloping roof had slipped or cracked, letting in the wind, rain and light of the East Neuk of Fife. The family fell in love with it.

Kellie, rented and restored by the Lorimers from 1878, became John Henry’s greatest source of inspiration. It was a place of retreat, somewhere to observe and record the changing light of each day and changing seasons of each year. The castle passed to the National Trust for Scotland in 1970.

The audioguide for Reflections: The light and life of John Henry Lorimer is presented and produced by the exhibition co-curator, Charlotte Lorimer. It includes the panels of text displayed in the exhibition, as well as dramatised readings of family letters and memoirs, performed by Clive Russell, George Lorimer, Ed Wade, Natasha Jobst and Sarah Haynes. The audioguide also includes twelve original poems by Christine de Luca. The exhibition runs from 6th November 2021 to 20th March 2022 at The City Art Centre in Edinburgh.

John Henry Lorimer was born in Edinburgh on 12th August 1856 and died in Fife on 4th November 1936. During his 80 years, he completed nearly 400 oil paintings, including almost 130 portraits. Portraiture became his main source of income, a talent that enabled him to create his beloved landscapes and paintings of everyday family and domestic life.

As an adolescent, he was tutored by George Paul Chalmers and William McTaggart at The Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), where he first exhibited at 17. In the years that followed, he endeavoured to see and study the galleries of Europe: France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Holland - although he always looked forward to returning home to Scotland.

John Henry created most of his paintings in his turret studio at Kellie, a space he once compared to the cabin of a ship in a storm. In later life, he worked from his townhouse in Edinburgh or The Gyles, the house in Pittenweem harbour that he restored when he was 74. He also spent time painting in London and Paris, where he studied under the artist Carolus-Duran for two months in 1884.

Unlike his contemporaries, John Henry never attached himself to a group or movement. He chose to work alone, striving to capture the characters and landscapes around him with accuracy and sensitivity.

The audioguide for Reflections: The light and life of John Henry Lorimer is presented and produced by the exhibition co-curator, Charlotte Lorimer. It includes the panels of text displayed in the exhibition, as well as dramatised readings of family letters and memoirs, performed by Clive Russell, George Lorimer, Ed Wade, Natasha Jobst and Sarah Haynes. The audioguide also includes twelve original poems by Christine de Luca. The exhibition runs from 6th November 2021 to 20th March 2022 at The City Art Centre in Edinburgh.

John Henry, known by his family as JH, was the third of six children. The eldest was James, then came Hannah, JH, Alice, Louise and Robert. Their parents, Hannah Stodart and Professor James Lorimer, first met in 1848 on a ferry from Leith to Fife, home to the seaside towns and fishing villages where the Professor stayed each summer to ease his asthma. Little did they know that this chance meeting would lead to almost forty years of marriage and the restoration of Kellie Castle, a place that would likely be a ruin today had it not been for their determination to save it.

During the summer of 1878, when the 38-year lease for Kellie had been secured, the Lorimer family did what it could to contribute to its restoration, working alongside local builders and craftsmen. They stitched curtains and embroidered tapestries, planned and planted the garden, carved chairs and completed the watercolours and oil paintings that would one day hang in the Library or Great Hall.

Many pieces were made by the hand of the eldest daughter Hannah, an all-round artist whose nickname was Lorrie. Of all his brothers and sisters, Lorrie was the one JH seemed closest to. She modelled for several of his paintings, including his first double portrait. Further early portraits centred on his mother, father and younger brother Robert, who went on to become a renowned architect and furniture designer.

The Lorimers were a family that truly valued the arts. John Henry’s mother held a lifelong passion for music and attended painting lessons at the Edinburgh School of Design. She later studied geology and theology at the University of Edinburgh, where her husband James was Professor of Public Law. John Henry also enrolled at the University of Edinburgh but his parents gave him permission to leave before graduating to pursue a career in the arts.

The audioguide for Reflections: The light and life of John Henry Lorimer is presented and produced by the exhibition co-curator, Charlotte Lorimer. It includes the panels of text displayed in the exhibition, as well as dramatised readings of family letters and memoirs, performed by Clive Russell, George Lorimer, Ed Wade, Natasha Jobst and Sarah Haynes. The audioguide also includes twelve original poems by Christine de Luca. The exhibition runs from 6th November 2021 to 20th March 2022 at The City Art Centre in Edinburgh.

All his life, John Henry was inspired and supported by the women around him: his mother, his sisters, his nieces and the nanny that raised them, as well as the housemaids that looked after the family homes in Edinburgh and Fife. He was brought up by a father who wrote about the importance of educating women and granting them the vote, and a mother who ensured that both she and her daughters were educated to university level.

Many of his paintings seemed to have been inspired by his sister Alice and her six children. Between 1878 and 1894, she spent most of her time in Guyana, where her husband Sir David Chalmers was Chief Justice. During those sixteen years, she returned to Kellie three times, each time bringing with her a new child.

The joy that her young children brought to everyone at Kellie can be seen within John Henry’s paintings. Yet so can the sorrow of each farewell, firstly for the young bride Alice and later for James, the eldest Lorimer son. In 1883, he left to seek his fortune in Melbourne, never to return. James seemed to be especially missed by Louise, the youngest Lorimer daughter, who lived in Scotland all her life and penned articles on its history.

Neither Louise nor John Henry ever married, although John Henry may have been plagued by unrequited love. The names Harriet, Jennie and Isobel have all been mentioned within the family as women John Henry may have loved and had to let go.

The audioguide for Reflections: The light and life of John Henry Lorimer is presented and produced by the exhibition co-curator, Charlotte Lorimer. It includes the panels of text displayed in the exhibition, as well as dramatised readings of family letters and memoirs, performed by Clive Russell, George Lorimer, Ed Wade, Natasha Jobst and Sarah Haynes. The audioguide also includes twelve original poems by Christine de Luca. The exhibition runs from 6th November 2021 to 20th March 2022 at The City Art Centre in Edinburgh.

For John Henry, painting and storytelling seemed to go hand in hand. The setting he returned to over and over again was Kellie. The characters within his frames were his friends, neighbours and family members. The plots were told through everyday moments: the delight of a birthday party, the quiet of a sleeping nephew, the serenity of three women reading and sewing together.

One woman who became a pivotal character for John Henry was Joanna Herbert. Employed by his sister Alice as a nanny in 1880, she looked after all six of his nieces and nephews and remained part of the family for almost 40 years. On multiple occasions, she accompanied Alice and her children to Scotland from Guyana, where she was born. Her final years were spent in Edinburgh. Joanna is the woman at the centre of Lullabye, the first painting John Henry sent to the Salon in Paris. She also features in Grandmother’s Birthday, the first painting by a Scottish artist to be bought by the French Government. The purchase almost earned John Henry the Legion d’Honneur, the highest accolade for a painter at the time. He was unable to accept the medal due to various British regulations around foreign honours in the arts.

Such a grievance, combined with his disappointment at not being elected to the Royal Academy (RA) in London, is likely to have contributed to the self-doubt of his later years. Even so, he never stopped valuing the beauty he saw before him, never stopped striving to tell the stories of the people he loved, never stopped reflecting the light of the place he called home.

The audioguide for Reflections: The light and life of John Henry Lorimer is presented and produced by the exhibition co-curator, Charlotte Lorimer. It includes the panels of text displayed in the exhibition, as well as dramatised readings of family letters and memoirs, performed by Clive Russell, George Lorimer, Ed Wade, Natasha Jobst and Sarah Haynes. The audioguide also includes twelve original poems by Christine de Luca. The exhibition runs from 6th November 2021 to 20th March 2022 at The City Art Centre in Edinburgh.