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Blackfriar's Wynd in Spring 1825
Skene, James, 1825, Watercolour
Blackfriar's Wynd in Spring 1825
Blackfriar's Wynd in Spring 1825
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Item no
1172
Title
Blackfriar's Wynd in Spring 1825
Artist / maker
Skene, James
Date
1825
Size
24 x 15 cm.
Type
Watercolour
Location
Edinburgh and Scottish Collection
Blackfriar's Wynd, now Blackfriar's Street, runs from Edinburgh's Cowgate to the High Street, emerging approximately half way between the Tron Kirk and the Netherbow. The name "Blackfriars" is associated with a Dominican monastery which, in medieval times, was situated south of the Cowgate, near the top of what is now Infirmary Street (named after the former Royal Infirmary which later stood on the site of the Convent). The monastery was founded by Alexander II in 1230 (1).
Dominican monks traditionally wore a black habit which gave rise to the name "Blackfriars". As James Skene notes in "Reekiana", the Blackfriars, unlike the Franciscans or "Greyfriars," were not confined to the walls of their monastery, but went out into the community to preach, hence their Latin description, "Pridicatores"(2). They were also medicants. They subsisted on alms and were not permitted to own personal possessions. The relative freedom of the Dominican order provoked the rivalry and even the animosity of other orders (e.g. the Franciscans), leading, according to Skene, to "abusive tales of their dissolute habits". He suggests that the jealousy led to "these absurd sculptured caricatures of Friars or Monks in obscene attitudes".
In the watercolour, James Skene views Blackfriar's Wynd from the lower end of the close. The picture evokes a noisy and crowded street scene in a narrow Old Town wynd, far narrower than its 21st century counterpart. By 1825, when the watercolour was painted, fashionable society had long relocated to the New Town of Edinburgh, and the Old Town had become associated with poverty and squalor. The head of Blackfriar's Wynd had been destroyed by the Great Fire of 1824, which had swept through the High Street and Parliament Square, a conflagration which "surpassed in fury and extent of destruction any of the many disasters of the kind to which the city has from time to time been exposed"(3) . In 1825, the original lower section of Blackfriar's Wynd was still intact. Skene was fascinated by the surviving 15th and 16th century houses which, he tells us, reminded him of a narrow street which he had discovered, during the course of his many travels, in the old city of Nantes in Brittany (4).
(1) Maitland, William, History of Edinburgh, 1753, 181
(2) Skene, James, Reekiana, Edinburgh Central Library Archive, 1836, 129
(3) Skene, Reekiana, 92
(4) Skene, 128
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