Scottish clash

Highlands and Islands: Paintings and Poems
Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, until 5 June

Pictures are usually exhibited with closed-shop segregation from the other arts, so it is a joy to find the bounds broken by this exuberant celebration of one of the oldest and most beautiful places on earth.

The show announces the publication of Highlands and Islands (Eland, £8.99), a poetry anthology (mostly 20th-century, not all by Scots) from Beccan mac Luigdech of Rum (died 677) to the present, selected and annotated by Mary Miers, the architectural historian and authority on Highland and Island culture. Her family home is on South Uist, so she brings a native passion to her subject. Relevant poems, some extra to the book, are displayed alongside the pictures; and there is also a programme of readings and musical events.

It is two shows in one. The first is a selection of Fleming Collection pictures, from the 18th century to the present. Favourites are well represented: the Colourists in force; a McTaggart senior of spectral children by the sea; two Thorburn oils — snow scenes of ptarmigan and black game; and a small McIntosh Patrick showing what a rollercoaster a Highland road can be. The stark ‘Ballachulish Quarries’ by John Guthrie Spence Smith (1880–1951) acts as an industrial foil to romanticism.

The second, mostly from Mary Miers’s personal archive, is contained in a large display case in the lower gallery: a generous mix of pictures, photographs, prints, rare books and piquant miscellanea. Is there a more beautiful evocation of West Coast stillness than Paul Strand’s photograph ‘Tir A’Mhurain, South Uist’? Among the outside loans are watercolours by Jemima Blackwell, described by Ruskin as ‘the best artist he knew’, and Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Loch Hourn’, its foreground wild flowers in jamjars evocative of Highland summer holidays.