Edward A. Walton and the Glasgow City Chambers Murals

After Glasgow’s Venetian-style City Chambers were opened in 1888, the social reformer and polymath Sir Patrick Geddes complained that they had ‘well-wrought mahogany…but no mural paintings’. Geddes had recently admired the ambitious programme under way in Paris of murals for public buildings, intended to celebrate local, civic and national identity. But Glasgow was not to be outdone. Within a few years, its City Council sent a fact-finding mission to view the new Paris murals, and in 1899 it commissioned its own murals for the Banqueting Hall of the City Chambers. Painted by the Glasgow Boys, the murals portray four episodes from Glasgow’s history and the legend of St. Mungo. The talk will explore the fascinating role played in their evolution by two impressionistic sketches in The Hunterian collections by Edward A Walton. One shows Glasgow’s patron saint Mungo taking Saint Fergus to Cathures for burial, and thereby receiving his holy spirit, and the other shows the building in turn of Glasgow Cathedral on Fergus’s resting place. Walton ultimately painted a different subject, Glasgow Fair in Olden Times, but we will see how its themes of locality and labour, and renewal and community, develop directly from his sketches in The Hunterian collections, and can be recognised also in the other murals, including Modern Shipbuilding on the Clyde, by Sir John Lavery. If Lavery echoed some of the recent Paris murals in boldly representing a modern industrial theme, then, as will be shown, he also subtly complemented Walton’s imaginative vision of Glasgow’s religious and historical origins. Join Prof. Clare A.P. Willsdon (University of Glasgow) in this online talk exploring the work of Glasgow Boy, Edward A Walton.