subject: Stirling Smith Museum And Art Gallery [print this page] Introduction Introduction
The Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum formerly The Smith Institute has played a very special part in the history of Stirling since its foundation in 1874. Established by the bequest of artist Thomas Stuart Smith (1815-1869) on land supplied by the Burgh of Stirling, it is an historic public-private partnership which has continued to the present day. It was founded as a gallery of mainly contemporary art, with museum and library reading room or the benefit of the inhabitants of Stirling, Dunblane and Kinbuck.
Today, it functions as a gallery, museum and cultural centre for the Stirling area. It is the repository for the historical artefacts and paintings of Stirlingshire, at the same time offering exhibition opportunities for contemporary artists. Over twenty community groups meet regularly in its lecture theatre, and a caf and biodiversity garden are among its newest attractions.
According to the Art Journal of 1896 the Smith did good work of quiet, unostentatious usefulness. It has continued to do this and often the public do not recognise the Smith collections when they see them. They are used to illustrate many promotional brochures for Stirling and Scotland, from simple leaflets to books and the prestigious City Bid document of 2001. Images from the collection are also used in displays in visitor centres, including the Wallace Monument, throughout the area, and in the pages of national newspapers and in history books.
From the beginning, the Smith has had a collection of considerable historic and artistic significance. Although specialist publications for different exhibitions and aspects of the collection have been issued over the last twenty years, there has been no attempt at issuing a general catalogue since 1934.
Smith history
When the writer and former suffragette Eunice Murray made her impassioned plea for Scottish folk museums, it was in the wake of the Second World War. She saw the establishment of museums as an essential feature of a peaceful and civilised society, and being familiar with Continental folk museums, regretted their absence in Scotland.
At this time, the Smith Institute was already 70 years old and had a large collection of folk life material relating to lighting, heating, cooking, spinning and weaving, agriculture and Stirling life in times past. Its use as a billet for troops in both World Wars curtailed its potential and kept it closed, in the latter instance, until 1948. The rest of the twentieth century was spent in repairing the damage and recovering from the war, and none of the other rural communities to whom Eunice Murray was appealing, found the resources to set up additional museums. Otherwise, Stirlingshire might well have had museums in Aberfoyle, Bannockburn, Callendar, Cowie, Doune, Dunmore, Fallin, Gargunnock, Killearn, Killin, Kippen, Plean, St . Ninians and Thornhill. The circumstances were right in Dunblane, where the museum was established in 1943. At present, only the Stirling Smith, Dunblane Museum and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum operate within the vast 2,200 square kilometres of the Stirling Council area.
The Stirling Smith has had a chequered history of 130 years which is worth examining in detail. The founder, Thomas Stuart Smith was an artist who wanted the art gallery element of his Institute to predominate.
The Smith Institute first opened to the public on 11 August 1874. It was an occasion for great celebration in Stirling, and the shops in the town closed at 12 noon to allow people to attend the opening. Nevertheless, there were some mixed feelings, for Thomas Stuart Smith, had died in 1869 and the location of the building was felt by many people to be too far away from the old town.
At the opening ceremony, Provost Christie refuted criticism of the location by pointing out that ive or ten minutes walk would bring any one to the Institute from the most distant part of the Burgh and that the site was chosen on environmental grounds ree from the noise and bustle and free from the dirt, dust and smoke, so that the students of art, science and literature could pursue their studies there unmolested and free from annoyance. It was perhaps thanks to Provost Christie that the organisation came into being at all, for Thomas Stuart Smith first thoughts were to leave his money to the Artists Benevolent Association.
Thomas Stuart Smith (1815-1869)
Thomas Stuart Smith was a man of fluctuating fortune with a colourful history who became an artist of considerable accomplishment, widely admired by his fellow artists. His grandmother was one of the Jaffray family in Stirling. The family story was that Thomas father and uncle were in love with the same woman, had a disagreement over her and parted. Thomas was illegitimate and his mother died when he was young. His father, a merchant working in Canada and the West Indies, sent the young Thomas to school in France. When the school fees failed to arrive in 1831, Thomas deduced that his father was dead. Thomas and his uncle Alexander Smith who held the estate of Glassingall, Dunblane were shocked to hear of each other existence. Alexander Smith, although he never met his newly discovered nephew, provided some financial support for him from time to time.
Thomas Stuart Smith obtained a post as a tutor to a young nobleman, travelling with the family to Naples, where he obtained for himself some tuition in painting from a master painter arsigli, the first painter here and one of the first in Italy. In 1840 Thomas made y first attempt at landscape and my first oil picture. He was funded by his uncle to study and paint in various places in Italy in the 1840s, and by 1849 was exhibiting both at the Salon des Beaux Arts in Paris and the Royal Academy in London.
In that year, Alexander Smith died leaving no direct family and no will. Although he had been Thomas Stuart Smith main financial support, there was difficulty in proving their relationship, and eighteen people pursued claims on the Glassingall estate. It took Smith from 1849 to January 1857 to secure the inheritance of Glassingall.
The estate was much diminished through the demands of legal fees, and Smith missed the warmth and light of the continent. In 1863 he sold the estate, rented a studio at Fitzroy Square in London and began to build up his own art collection, purchasing from his contemporaries both in Britain and in Europe. With no need to sell his own work, he liked the idea of building an Institute which would house it and his general collection for he welfare of the town and district of Stirling in Scotland. He drew up a rust Disposition and Settlement for the building of a useum or Institute in Stirling, agreeing to provide 5000 for the building if the town provided a site for it within two years. He had a very specific idea of how the building should be
Composed of three principal rooms of offices and store rooms, with space left on either side for contingent additions. The style of the building to be plain (Italian), but of first-rate material and construction the three rooms to be a Museum, a Picture Gallery and a Library and Reading Room, adapted for the benefit of the artisan and working classes.
He intended to oversee the construction himself. The Trust Disposition, naming his fellow artist A. W. Cox, his solicitor James Barty and the Provost of Stirling as Trustees was signed in November 1869. On 31 December he died unexpectedly at Avignon in the south of France.
T. S. Smith was something of an artist artist. Having had to struggle to study and practice his art, he had great sympathy for others in the same position, and frequently helped others. The first picture he exhibited in the Royal Academy was a painting of two young artists asking for shelter at the door of a convent in Italy. It was bought by Professor Owen, who had it hanging in his London house. According to Sir William Stirling Maxwell, 'The late Sir Edwin Landseer was struck by it and never visited Professor Owen without taking it down from the wall and examining it with some new expression at the masterly qualities which it exhibited.'
Smith was accomplished in landscape, interiors and excelled in portrait painting too. Whilst pursuing his claim to the Glassingall estate, he lived as an art teacher and portrait painter in Nottingham for a time. One of his pupils, James Orrock (1829-1913) recalled his work with delight and remembered him as man who could paint anything, who was a close friend of John Phillip RA, and who knew Troyon and most of the other masters of the Barbizon School. Phillip regarded Smith as ne of the best living colourists.
In the last year of his life, Smith submitted two remarkable portraits to the Royal Academy. Both were of black men of African origin. The Fellah of Kinneh depicts a young man in striped robes. The Pipe of Freedom celebrates the abolition of slavery in America. A smaller study of the same man, The Cuban Cigarette, shows the subject in profile. In subject and presentation, these portraits are quite rare in Scottish painting, and were given pride of place in the Africa in Scotland exhibition in Edinburgh in 1996. They also featured in the Black Victorians exhibition in Birmingham in 2005 and in Manchester in 2006. Black people were sometimes included in paintings. The Lost Child Restored by Sir George Harvey in the Smith own collection, where the negro servant is depicted in the doorway is a good example of an incidental inclusion. In Smith paintings of black men, the subjects are central, handsome, proud, independent and free. With fellow landowners in the Stirling area managing estates in Jamaica, such paintings would not have been popular. However, another member of the Jaffray family, itizen William Jaffray (1749-1828) had attained local fame through assisting a female slave on the way back to the West Indies to abscond and claim her freedom. His national fame was won through vaccinating some 16,000 children and saving Stirling from the small pox epidemics which raged elsewhere.
The work of T. S. Smith is often overlooked or under valued in Scottish art history. This is because the history is largely market-related. Smith had no need to paint for the board room or the market; his paintings were garnered for Stirling. He wanted his paintings to survive in a single collection, and bought back earlier works for that purpose when he was able to do so.
Museums and collections in Stirling
It was said that mith munificence inaugurated what might be called a new era in the annals of the town of Stirling. Certainly, the desire to have such a facility in the burgh was long standing. The Stirling School of Arts which was part library, part mechanics institute was formed in 1825 with the intention of building such an establishment. It started out with a small lending library in a rented room in Broad Street in November 1825. Throughout its life, it attracted lecturers of national note. Its Annual Soirees were demonstrations of intent. In 1854 for example, the need for lecture room, library and museum, and a public place where interesting specimens of art may be deposited was again reiterated and Sir Archibald Alison declared that tirling will take its place in literature, science and art, which it has long in Scottish history taken in arms.
The 1854 Soiree showed the potential of a permanent gallery and museum. The Corn Exchange was hired for the purpose, and the walls hung with tartans and evergreens supplied by the Drummonds. There was also a plough and sheaf of wheat from the Drummond Agricultural Museum. It is evident that the different branches of the Drummond family had given considerable assistance. They were tartan retailers, seedsmen, evangelical and temperance publishers and the owners of the Agricultural Museum (established 1831) to show the latest innovations in agriculture. Along one wall, prints and casts were shown, and there was an arrangement of Grecian statuary in front of the platform. Model steam and water engines were displayed, along with the chair of the Reverend James Guthrie, who had been martyred for his beliefs in 1661. This chair became part of the Macfarlane Museum collection, and is now in the Stirling Smith.
There were various private collections of antiquities in Stirling in the nineteenth century. In the Douglas Room in Stirling Castle was an assortment of arms and armour, including the pikes and other weapons taken from the radical weavers of 1820, and the pulpit of John Knox. The collection of Dr. Alexander Paterson (1822-1897), ong one of the chief attractions of Bridge of Allan had the skull of Darnley, a piece of Sir William Wallace fetters, a fragment of Robert the Bruce coffin and the key of Loch Leven Castle. The collection was sold in January 1899 and items from it were gifted to the Smith over the years.
The Macfarlane Museum was assembled by John Macfarlane of Coneyhill, Bridge of Allan (1785-1868) whose wealth was derived from textile manufacture in Manchester. He was the great local champion of the principle of the free library in Stirling where he opened a library and reading room in 1854. In 1881 the Macfarlane Free Library was transferred to the Smith along with the Macfarlane Museum which contained many important local objects and the Smith curator was charged with the additional task of looking after it. The Museum Hall, Bridge of Allan was built by the Macfarlane Trustees in 1887 as a Concert Hall. The marble bust of John MacFarlane was acquired for the Smith collection in 2002.
When the Smith site was selected, it was not in an advantageous part of the burgh. 1400 people signed a petition pointing this out. The building was the second to be built on the north side of the Dumbarton Road, in the King Park, which was under development as an up-market residential area. The King Park was cut off from the old town by the medieval wall. It remained unconnected until a new vehicular road was driven through at the Corn Exchange when the Carnegie Library was built in 1904. There was no direct road to the Smith. The pathway from the High School of Stirling (now the Stirling Highland Hotel) was created as a main access route to the Smith only after the Institute was opened to the public. The issue of breaching the medieval wall was one which was traditionally opposed by the people of Stirling. Today, these issues would be resolved by public consultation. The autocratic way in which the site was selected and the extinction of the hope for a museum facility in the old town was deeply resented, as shown by the obituary notice in the Stirling Observer which recounted the story of the Stirling School of Art:
ied at Stirling, on the 8th ult. of sheer neglect, after a lingering illness borne with the utmost indifference on the part of its professed friends, the Stirling School of Art in the 50th year of its ageSo hopeless did the condition of the association become that the Directors mercifully cut its sufferings short by shooting it, as they would have done an old horse that had served its day.
The obituary writer went on to note that:
hat centre of intellectual darkness known as Denny, and Airth, Callander, Menstrie and St Ninians all had lectures. The Regime of the Provost of Stirling was like that of Napoleon who made Paris beautiful with boulevards, but did nothing for moral and intellectual welfare of his people. We do not forget the Smith Institute. It is a great boon to the town, and is calculated to be a powerful promoter of that weetness and light which we so much need. But it is the gift of a private individual, and neither the Council nor the Community are entitled to take any credit for it. What have we done for the working classes? As a community, nothing, absolutely nothing. As regards the Smith; its distance from the centre of the town must prevent it from ever becoming a popular resort. It is all very well to say that if a man wants knowledge he will not grudge to walk a mile or two for it. That is true. But what is required is not so much to supply those with knowledge who desire it, as to place it in an inviting form at the very doors of those who have no wish for it, in order that, if possible, such a wish may be begotten.
The Smith Building
If the building was geographically disadvantaged, the lack of a living patron added to the problem. Thomas Stuart Smith had intended to supervise the construction personally. Many corners were cut in the construction, and it is evident from the idiosyncratic structure of the roof that the architect, John Lessels (1808-1883) of Edinburgh , had little direct input.
Most of the building material came from the Raploch Quarry on the northern side of the Castle escarpment, now the site of the Fire Station. Additional sandstone came from a quarry at Dunmore.
The frontage to Dumbarton Road has a tetra style (four pillared) Doric portico. The tympanum carries two relief carvings of the Stirling seal, the wolf on the left side and the Castle on the right. In the centre is a coat of arms purporting to be that of Thomas Stuart Smith, but the heraldic arrangement is unknown and has never been entered at the Court of the Lord Lyon. The inscription on the entablature below reads The Smith Institute, erected and endowed with funds bequeathed by Thomas Stuart Smith of Glassingall Perthshire. There are six steps to the front door. The wrought metal handrail by Phil Johnston of Ratho Byres Forge was added in 2000. At either side of the steps are two plinths for sculpture (at present with urns) and there is an empty sculpture niche on the right side of the building.
The frontage to Victoria Road and the Back Walk is 218feet (66m) in length and is broken by two gables having three-light Venetian windows which are surmounted by pediments. The pediments are inscribed with bronze lettering as follows: Erected 1873. Trustees George Christie, Provost of Stirling, J. W. Barty Dunblane, A. W. Cox Nottingham and John Lessels Edinburgh Architect.
The west side of the building has a blank wall with no windows, this being the architectural interpretation of the Trust Deed of having pace on either side for contingent additions. The back or north wall has three access doors added in 1985-7 during the refurbishment of the building.
The Smith had residential accommodation for the curator, and this was occupied by a succession of staff until 1959. When the building was requisitioned by the army in 1914, the curator and his family remained in residence. A separate entrance to the curator house was created by the army through enlarging a window. This is now the staff entrance, and the former domestic premises are now offices.
There were five public areas to the Smith in 1874. On the left of the entrance was the Reading Room and Lib
