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St. Fittick's Well
1853 A photograph from 1906 of St. Fittick's Well, located in the Bay of Nigg.
An account of the well is given by Thomas W. Ogilvie (1861-1908) in The Book of Saint Fittick, a history of Torry, written and presented as a Bazaar Book to Saint Fittick's Church, Torry, in December 1901.
Ogilvie worked as a doctor in Torry for seven years and was prominent in the public life of the district. An account of his life is given in the introduction to a posthumously published collection of his verse, Poems (1911).
Ogilvie suggests use the well dates to pagan times and gives an account of its storied healing powers and the tradition of offering gifts in the hope of good health and fortune. He suggests St Fittick, the patron saint of Torry, became the object of these benefactions after the arrival of Christianity.
He details the tradition of visiting the area and leaving gifts on the first Sunday of May. Ogilvie writes:
"Town Council and Kirk Session struggled by laws and punishments to stop those Sunday wanderings and to efface those vestiges of old superstitions, but the customs of centuries die hard, and to-day young and old, to whom the name St. Fittick is a meaningless term and the repute of his well quite unknown, ramble on Sundays and week-days to the bay once called by his name, and they find the old power still lingers, for the beauty of the Bay, the fresh sea-breeze, and the pure draught from the old spring still bless and heal."
The well is understood to have been washed away by coastal erosion in the early 20th century. Its location, latterly its site, is recorded in old large scale Ordnance Survey maps. Willie Grant
2630 A portrait of Blind Willie Grant taken from East Neuk Chronicles by William Skene (1905). Grant was a pianist who would accompany performers at regular "free-and-easies" held on Thursday and Saturday nights in the Wallace Tower and Mother M'Cuag's Caledonian Hotel on Castle Street. According to Skene, whatever the song, Willie could accompany it.
Skene states that "It was not a bad job when these free-and-easies were stopped, as there was a fascination about these places that had an insidious effect on young men that was not easily shaken off, as I knew by experience." (page 35) Treasure 50: Heroines of Shakspeare
221 Celebrating 400 years since the death of the literary great, one of our April treasures looks at an unusual publication concerning the works of William Shakespeare.
Published in the mid-19th Century, this wonderful volume was donated to Aberdeen Public Library by Miss Emily Jane Duthie, a retired teacher living on Skene Terrace.
Born in India in 1868 Miss Duthie was the daughter of Robert Duthie, Superintendent of the Scottish Orphanage in Bombay during the days of the British Empire. The school was founded in 1847 by Scottish Christian Missionaries to educate the daughters of Scottish Presbyterian Soldiers based in India. Since then, the school has continued to thrive and is now one of the most prestigious in Mumbai.
It is highly likely that Miss Duthie's early years based at the institution, followed by her own studies and subsequent career would have introduced her to the world of Shakespeare and perhaps piqued an interest in the many female characters depicted therein. The kind donation clearly demonstrates her continuing desire and passion to educate others in later life, once her career as a teacher had come to an end.
"The heroines of Shakspeare" is chiefly an art book; a means to showcase the forty-eight imagined portraits of the Bard's fictional characters. The attempt to capture a visual representation of the prominent female characters provides a neat bridge between Shakespeare's contemporary audiences (who would have seen female roles assigned to young boys), and our modern age of television and film which is frequently dominated by physical appearance.
Although educated Victorian audiences would have been familiar with the written words, the illustrations attempt to capture a definitive image of each character, including approximate age, costume, physical features and demeanour as revealed by the playwright.
The images are portraits of Hamlet's Ophelia, Othello's Desdemona, Romeo and Juliet's Juliet and of course - Lady Macbeth (from the Scottish play!)
The illustrations are printed on thick paper from original engravings by portrait artists including Augustus Egg, John Hayter and John William Wright. The book is bound with gilt edges and also contains sturdy decorated endboards.
The curious spelling of Shakespeare in the title reflects the fact that during the Bard's own lifetime there was no single accepted form - the man himself spelling his own name differently in various editions of his work. Although this may seem strange to modern readers the tradition harks back to an era when language was much more fluid, and established forms of spelling simply did not exist in the way that we know today.
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