James Pryde; the Edgar Allan Poe of Painting

Not so long ago a tall tenement, a few doors down from the home of a friend of mine, fell down. My friend told me about it: the crash that sent her running to her children's room; the wave of dust that rushed along the street turning the summer's evening into choking night. She described the bewildered tenants standing on the pavement, some in pyjamas, one wrapped only in a towel, all of them empty handed. The sound that had heralded the building's collapse was so sudden and so loud they'd fled with nothing. It had saved their lives.

We visited the shell of the tenement on our way to the park. The council had put a fence around it, and braced the neighbouring apartment block with massive wooden props. We could see the guts of the demolished building, the depth of the foundations where a hundred years or so ago men had finished digging then turned their hand to the business of raising high, sandstone walls. Above us the exposed gable gaped at the sky. All that remained of the homes which had been stacked neatly beneath it, one on top of the other, was the wall adjoining the next building. It still held glimpses of the departed families: frayed wallpaper, a calendar hanging miraculously from a nail, a poster flapping in the breeze. High up, on the jagged remains of a top storey, an electric wall lamp glowed.

The void where the building had been was deathly. The tenements that framed it seemed taller than before. My friend and I lingered in silence, like mourners at a cenotaph, small and insignificant, swamped by absence. We might have been figures in a painting by James Pryde.

James Ferrier Pryde was born in Edinburgh in 1866, and though he was to spend more time in London than north of the border, the city of his birth retained a strong influence over his work:

I was very much impressed with the spirit of Holyrood, the castle and the old houses and closes of the High Street. The spirit of them appears to have affected my later work, although it did not do so in my pictures when I was younger.¹

Edinburgh landscapes haunt some of his paintings. The former British Linen Bank (now a Bank of Scotland) and the Melville Monument, both located in St. Andrews Square, are depicted in 'The Shell' (1908) and 'The Duke of York's Column' (c.1909-10) respectively. Pryde was conscious of striving for effect rather than realism. One of his sayings was, 'pictures must be pictures, not windows' and though they borrow from life, Pryde's landscapes are always works of the imagination. The bank's six columns are elongated and the building set on an invented slope, making it higher and more sinister than it appears in actuality. Monumentalism is a repeated trope. The figures with indistinct faces that often lurk beneath his buildings are dwarfed into insignificance. The impression of human fragility is reinforced by the large scale of some of his canvases. Surrounded by Pryde's paintings the viewer is also dwarfed. This identification between observer and subject is unsettling. We too are rendered small; transitory figures in a world of decay.

The light in Pryde's landscapes seems always to be a northern one. Where we do have an expanse of sky it is generally screened by clouds. 'The Flying Dutchman' (c.1911) is being chased into harbour by an incoming storm, 'The Deserted Garden' (c.1909) cast into shadows. Often the sky is only just glimpsed behind the looming focal structure, as in 'The Red Ruin'. It's tempting to see the city of Pryde's birth in the high walls and obscured heavens. He would have been thirteen when Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this description of Edinburgh's Old Town:

You go under dark arches, and down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a hand on either wall; so steep that, in the greasy winter weather the pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. Washing dangles above washing from windows; the houses bulge outwards upon flimsy brackets; you see a bit of sculpture in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and a few crowsteps are printed on the sky.²

The Uknown Corner by James Pryde Drying washing was to feature in many of Pryde's paintings. It sways from a balcony high above a towering archway in 'The Unknown Corner' (c.1912), droops from windows in 'La Casa Rosa' (1911-12) and takes the form of ragged bunting in 'The Duke of York's Column' (c.1909-10) and 'Vision of Dunecht Gates' (c.1922). Rendering fabric is a test of an artist's skill, but as with his cloudy skies, Pryde also repeatedly uses washing, bunting and drapes, to 'stage' his compositions. We get a sense of a curtain being drawn back to reveal what it is Pryde wishes to display. But curtains can also be used to conceal, and there is also the possibility that someone or something may lurk behind the hangings. The effect is one of uncertainty, a hesitation between what we see and what may be there, a sense of the uncanny. [...]

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¹ James Pryde quoted in Derek Hudson, James Pryde: 1866-1941 (Constable, 1949) p. 20.

² Robert Louis Stevenson, 'Old Town – The Lands', Edinburgh Picturesque Notes (Pallas Editions 2001 (1879)), p. 23.