The Athens of the North

“The Liberal Deviseth Liberal Things,” and if a man can make a few dollars in the bargain, that’s all to the better, egh?

I defy anyone to sleep in the economy class of a modern airplane. My solution to the transatlantic night flight is to grit my teeth and suffer through the next day, allowing my body to recover at night. No, said my hostess. You’ll feel far better if you rest for a few hours and then restart. With childish stubbornness, I refused.

Instead I headed to the Greyfriars Art Shop on Dundas Street to collect my canvas. There I had trouble remembering the term white spirits, which is what the rest of the world calls mineral spirits. Mercifully, I recognized the Winsor & Newton bottle. “That!” I stammered. By the time I got to my bed, I was sinking fast.

Francis Cadell’s last house on Ainslie Place preserves the open plan of the original Moray Estate townhouses. This allowed the owner a view of neo-classicism to the front and ‘wilderness’ to the back. I peered intently, but didn’t see the mantle in front of which he painted Portrait of a Lady in Black.

Three hours later, I awoke miraculously refreshed and quite happy. The sum total of my work toward my project was to take my model into the drawing room in which I will be working and discuss clothing, lighting, and the furniture. Then we took an amble.

Edinburgh’s New Town is the largest and best-preserved example of Georgian town planning in the UK. The severity of its terraces and monuments is offset by abundant green space, now budding out in green and frothed with bluebells and hawthorns. It will be my temporary home for the next week.

The New Town (as distinct from the medieval street plans of Old Town) was started in the second half of the 18^th century. It is strictly neo-classical in design, in keeping with the intellectual fashion of the moment.

A back garden along the Water of Leith.

Edinburgh was the seat of the Scottish Enlightenment. This was the distinctly Scottish version of an international outpouring of scientific and intellectual achievement. The Enlightenment as a whole affirmed the importance of human reason, and the Scottish form was practical in nature. It’s upon this that the Scottish reputation for invention and engineering is based.

Not only were Scottish achievements prized in their own right, but their principles were carried around the world, particularly to Canada and the United States. They’ve profoundly affected our material and economic culture to this day.

My own perambulations took me out through the back garden down to the Water of Leith, a small river that touches the city center at the New Town. Below me was the pump house for St. Bernard’s Well. Its name comes from the almost-certainly-spurious legend that the spring was first discovered by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the Cistercian order in the 12th century. In 1760, it was conveniently rediscovered by three members of George Heriot’s School. At the time, ‘taking the waters’ was all the rage among the well-heeled, based on the example set in Bath.

Victorian Hygieia presides over the Georgian temple and purportedly-Medieval well.

With typical Scottish practicality, a new pump room and ornate structure were designed for St. Bernard’s Well and then marketed aggressively:

This water so healthful near Edinburgh doth rise
which not only Bath but Moffat outvies.
It cleans the intestines and an appetite gives
while morbific matters it quite away drives. (Claudero, or James Wilson)

In 1884 the property was purchased by publisher William Nelson, who commissioned the statue of Hygieia and then gave the property to the city. It’s a capsule history of Edinburgh as a whole: medieval fable capped by an Enlightenment temple, with a Victorian diety overseeing it, all whipped together by a bunch of canny Scots with an eye to the main chance. Ah, what a glorious city!