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Yorinda and Yoringel in the Witch's Wood signed and dated 'John Duncan/1909' (lower right) and signed and inscribed 'No/Title: Yorinda and Yoringel/in the witch's wood/Grimm's Fairy Tales/Price 80/Artist: John Duncan/36 Torphichen Street Edinburgh/Agent Dott' (on an old label on the reverse of the frame) oil on canvas 261/4 x 36 1/8 in. (66.6 x 91.8 cm.) PROVENANCE with Aitken Dott, Edinburgh. LITERATURE J. Christian (ed.); The Last Romantics, 1989, p. 177, no. 394. EXHIBITION Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1910, no. 167. Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Autumn Exhibition, 1910, no. 1081. Glasgow, Scottish National Exhibition, 1911. London, Grafton Galleries, Art and Artists at the Grafton, 1913. Edinburgh, Bourne Fine Art, John Duncan: A Scottish Symbolist, 1983, no. 49. London, Barbican Art Gallery, The Last Romantics, 1989, no. 394. NOTES Duncan is one of the unsung heroes of the international Symbolist movement. He is little known outside his native Scotland, and his work was hailed as a revelation when many of the finest examples, including the present picture, were seen in the Last Romantics exhibition at the Barbican in 1989. Born in Dundee, the son of a cattle dealer, Duncan was studying at the Dundee School of Art by the age of eleven. After three years in London doing hack work for publishers, he continued his studies in Antwerp and Dusseldorf and spent a winter in Rome, where he developed an ardent admiration for Michelangelo. Back in Dundee, he became a member of the local Graphic Arts Association, and in 1908-9 he shared a studio with the brilliant but short-lived George Dutch Davidson (1879-1901), whom he greatly influenced. However, from 1892 he was mainly based in Edinburgh where he was closely associated with Patrick Geddes, biologist and town planner and prophet of the Celtic Revival. Geddes offered him the post of Director of his new art school and Duncan sought to express Geddes' ideas in a number of mural projects, notably a series of six panels illustrating scenes from Celtic history in the common room of University Hall in Ramsey Lodge. He was also involved with Geddes' influential magazine, The Evergreen . In 1899 he embarked on a tour of America with Geddes. In 1900 he lectured at the International Assembly of the Paris Exposition, and the same year became Associate Professor of Art at the Chicago University, holding the post for two years. On returning to Scotland, he made his home in Edinburgh, where his studio in Torphicen Street and later St Bernard's Crescent became a centre for a lively group of artists and intellectuals, including Geddes, Mrs Kennedy Fraser, Father John Gray, Lady Margaret Sackville, and such younger talents as Eric Robertson, Cecile Walton and Joyce Cary. One of his associates, the novelist Mary Agnew Hamilton, described him in her novel Yes (1914) as 'accumulating unsaleable works which pleased him but not the buyers.' In fact he received many commissions for altarpieces, church murals and stained glass, and was elected ARSA in 1910 and RSA in 1923. He was a great experimenter with techniques and much of his work is in tempera. His subject matter remained rooted in the Celtic Revival and the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, but he also painted 'straight' landscapes in Iona and elsewhere, and took a keen interest in the development of modern art. Many regarded him as a mystic, and he confessed to hearing 'fairy music' while he painted. This rather fay quality led him into trouble when he fell in love with and married a girl who believed she had discovered the Holy Grail in a well at Glastonbury; the marriage was not a success and his wife eventually left him, taking herself and her two daughters to South Africa. Yorinda and Yoringel is a comparatively early work, although it shows his style fully formed. It illustrates Grimm's fairy tale of the same name, which tells how two lovers wander into a wood where a witch turns the girl, Yorinda, into a nightingale and carries her off to her castle. Yoringel eventually rescues her with the aid of a magic flower. The subject was also treated by another 'Last Romantic', Mark Symons (1886-1935) in a picture exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1929.