Lorimer Society Annual Lectures 2022

Please book for this event by emailing: lorimersocietysecretary@gmail.com

Full Programme including lunch: £35pp

Lectures and morning coffee: £15pp

Payable by bank transfer to the Lorimer Society, Sort Code: 08-92-99 Account: 67213885

(Please add your name as reference)

OR by cheque payable to The Lorimer Society

Please send to Prof Aline-Wendy Dunlop,

Lorimer Society Secretary, 8 Regent Park Square, Glasgow G41 2AG

Lecture 1 (Odile Hughson)

'A charming and rather touching interlude: our grandparents’ connections with the exiled royal family.' (Esther Chalmers manuscripts, NLS)

In 1848, Queen Victoria offered asylum to Louis-Philippe, King of the French, following his abdication. His family stayed in Surrey for 23 years, until the end of the Second Empire and the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. In 1860, three grandsons of the ex-king came to the Scottish capital, where they spent two school terms at the Royal High School. The youngest, Louis de Condé, son of the duc d’Aumale, stayed with James and Hannah Lorimer in Hill Street …. A few years later, on the death of his former house guest, James Lorimer’s grief prompted him to put up a permanent record of the young man’s stay in Edinburgh. It is still there today, a poignant memento of a friendship which went beyond class, age, religion and nationality.

For the last 20 years Odile Hughson, Licence-ès-lettres (English Language & Literature), University of Aix-en-Provence has been a volunteer guide at the National Museum of Scotland doing both theme and general highlights tours of the Scottish and World Collections.

Lecture 2 (Professor Elizabeth Cumming)

Sir Robert Lorimer’s animalier: the remarkable career of Phyllis Mary Bone RSA

In a 1955 interview for The Scottish Field, Dr Tom Honeyman, the  director of Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, wrote of the animal sculptor Phyllis Bone (1894-1972) that she had ‘two strings to her bow’. This illustrated presentation looks in detail at both aspects of her life’s work, as a sculptor trained in Edinburgh and Paris who worked in the 1920s and 1930s with architects, notably Lorimer, and as an independent studio artist widely appreciated for her bronze studies of wild animals and birds. Now primarily remembered for her superb work at the Scottish National War Memorial, she also achieved lasting fame as the first woman to be elected a professional member of the Royal Scottish Academy.

Scottish art historian Elizabeth Cumming was the first curator of Edinburgh’s current City Art Centre and later taught design history at Edinburgh College of Art. Her books include Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts & Crafts Movement in Scotland (2006) and The Art of Modern Tapestry: Dovecot Studios since 1912 (2012). Her latest book on Phoebe Anna Traquair is due to be published shortly.