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John McKirdy Duncan RSA RSW (1866-1945) The Admirable Crichton Full length figure standing in St Marks Square, Venice Signed oil on canvas, 79x25.5cm Provenance. Colin C Sanderson Collection Note: This painting is a study for one of the six large panels illustrating aspects of Scottish history that Duncan painted in the late 1890s for the influential figure Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). These panels were painted for the common room of University Hall in Ramsay Lodge, part of the complex of buildings that Geddes had developed as student accommodation in Ramsay Garden on the edge of Edinburgh Castle esplanade. Duncan, who was close to Geddes, had already painted a frieze on the Evolution of Pipe Music for Geddes to be included in the latter's own flat in Ramsay Garden. Although Duncan's work now seems traditional he was at the time the leader of Edinburgh's avant-garde, his paintings and illustrations suffused with Symbolist, neo-Celtic and, latterly, Art Nouveau elements. The works that Duncan painted for University Hall were part of a Celtic revival expressed by a number of artists in the influential periodical, The Evergreen, and called by Geddes 'the Scots Renascence'. Duncan's subjects, besides the 'Crichton', included 'The Wakening of Cuchulain' and 'The Journey of St Mungo'. James Crichton, the subject of the painting offered for sale, was seen in the context of the series, as the archetypal Scottish itinerant scholar and prodigy. Born in 1560 in Cluny in Perthshire, son of a lord advocate, he was educated at St Salvator's College in the University of St Andrews along with the latinist poet George Buchanan. He then travelled abroad 'alternating readily from Mars to the Muses', to quote from Arthur Thomson's description of the murals published in 1896. He seems to have been a mercenary soldier in France and a scholar in Italy. He took part in a famous scholastic disputation in Venice in 1580 and this is where Duncan depicts him in the present painting, standing holding both sword and book in the Piazza San Marco, the lagoon behind him. His life ended prematurely about 1585 in Mantua where he was in the service of the duke, apparently killed by the duke's son in a nocturnal duel. A description of his exploits was published by Sir Thomas Urquhart, gaining him a perennial fame as a Scot of all talents.