IONA illuminated
100 Years of Celtic Art:
George Bain & Alexander Ritchie
Iona Abbey - Iona Heritage Centre - Aosdana Gallery
9th July to 22nd October 2011

Imagine a visit to Iona on a summer day one hundred years ago. A crew of four islanders rows you ashore from the paddle-steamer. On the jetty is a tall, trim-bearded man, dapper in dark suit and nautical cap. With a wave of his stick, and launching into a lively commentary, he leads you up the road toward the historic sites.

This was Alexander Ritchie, official Guide and Custodian. He was also a skilled craftsman - and at the heart of IONA illuminated lies the same vision that this man held. The island has long been a sacred place of pilgrimage, but it was also a source of inspiration for several 20th century artists, designers and silversmiths, all passionate about Iona’s early traditions of exquisite metalwork, intricate stone carving and marvellously illuminated manuscripts.

Alexander Ritchie was born in 1856 in Tobermory, Mull. When he was twelve, the family moved to Iona to take over the St Columba Hotel and farm. Alec followed his father, a ship’s captain, into a career at sea but a shipwreck in the 1890s left him with a permanent leg injury and he returned home. After the tourist steamers stopped for the season, he attended winter classes at the Glasgow School of Art, adding metalwork to woodcarving skills he had first learned aboard ship. There he met Euphemia Thomson, born in 1862 in Ardrishaig, Argyll, who was studying embroidery. The couple married in 1898 and within a year had set up Iona Celtic Art at the entrance to the Nunnery. Inside, walls and shelves gleamed with beaten brass and copper, chased silverware, enamelled jewellery, patterned bags and carved wooden or marble crosses. This was a pioneering venture, renowned in its day and much admired by later generations of silversmiths and collectors.

During the 1890s a young man named George Bain, born in Caithness in 1881, also began formal art training - in his case in Edinburgh. This was a vibrant decade in art, architecture and literature in both cities. The Arts & Crafts Movement was gathering pace, Charles Rennie Mackintosh led the new Glasgow Style and The Celtic Revival saw a resurgence of interest in the language, legends and decorative art of the Gael. Prominent in Edinburgh circles were visionary planner, educator and publisher, Patrick Geddes, and Symbolist painter John Duncan. In his early work Duncan used Iona settings and images of St Columba and came to know the island, and the Ritchies, well.

George Bain must have encountered both these men; until the age of 21 he attended the School of Applied Arts and The Edinburgh School of Art. His future career as artist and teacher would earn him an undisputed title, ‘the father of modern Celtic design’.

The Ritchies’ success had soon made outworkers and apprentices essential. Glasgow craftsman James Thomson came to help with production. Euphemia taught local girls embroidery and leather tooling. Alexander trained others in metalwork, among them Helen MacPhail, daughter of his great friend, Postmaster Angus MacPhail; she made many fine brass items for the shop. Iain MacCormick, born in 1917, grew up a few doors along from the Ritchies’ workshop. He watched Alec deftly transform flat metal into raised and beautiful shapes, and a lifelong passion was born. Visible from the MacCormick’s back garden is Maclean’s Cross, its fine foliated carving a reminder of the medieval craftsman’s skill. Later, Iain became a teacher of technical subjects in Paisley and, in his spare-time, built up a successful trade as a silversmith, often adapting the interlace and knotwork he had long known in fresh ways. Iain’s mother, Hannah MacCormick, managed the Highland Home Industries shop which had inherited the Ritchies’ stock in 1941. She also tended the Nunnery garden and passed her own needlework skills onto a younger generation.

Former farm steadings opposite the St Columba Hotel gardens house an outlet for local crafts and the studio and shop of Aosdana Gallery. Nearby is a small whitewashed bothy, now a bookshop where, in the 1880s, the Iona Press turned out hand-printed booklets of Gaelic lore and prayer, as souvenirs for visitors. Flora Ritchie, one of Alec’s sisters, taught local girls to paint the pages with decorative borders.

By the entrance to the Abbey grounds is the Reilig Odhrain, burial place of early kings of Scotland and Ireland and, later, chiefs of the great West Highland clans. An engraving from around 1900 shows Alec Ritchie with a group of visitors at one of the railed enclosures of carved graveslabs. Many of these stones, impressive and highly ornate, now stand around the Abbey cloisters or in the museum on the seaward side of the Abbey.

No trace is visible today of the monastery founded by Columba in the 6th century. Yet it was a centre of artistic, as well as spiritual, brilliance and the great 8th century High Crosses stand testimony to that: St Martin’s to the west of the Church, the original St John’s in the Abbey Museum. There too is a replica of the Book of Kells, created by scribes on Iona around the year 800, a work of astonishing beauty. An Irish annal writer described the manuscript as ‘the most precious object in the western world’.

These richly illustrated pages captivated the Ritchies, Iain MacCormick and George Bain. Bain studied the complex patterns in detail, in particular that of the eight-circled cross, the Book’s only carpet page (a page with no text or decorative initials but filled entirely with ornamentation). From this he made a series of stunning large-scale drawings, making us all the more aware how remarkable was the creation of the original, tiny elements.

The spectacular Tara Brooch, made in Ireland of cast silver-gilt around the year 700, also fascinated Bain. He drew coloured representations of it, filling in missing filigree panels with intricate designs of his own and published the drawing as a card with a Gaelic and English greeting. Alec Ritchie made a reproduction in silver of the Tara Brooch.

George Bain spent his teaching years at Kirkcaldy in Fife, retired with his wife to her native area of Drumnadrochit by Loch Ness, and died in Staffordshire in 1968. The 20th century renaissance in Celtic design and silversmithing owed much to this scholarly and inventive artist who finally unravelled the Celtic Knot. He devised, and popularised, the probable methods whereby these intricate, mathematical patterns were produced. He encouraged students not merely to copy the old, but to create anew, and to find different ways in which to apply their original designs: to textiles, leather, wood or metal; even linoleum was incorporated when appropriate. Alexander and Euphemia Ritchie, and Iain MacCormick, produced finely wrought work in a similar range of media. MacCormick also made extensive study of the older forms. His notebooks preserve many pages of hand-drawn detail from knotwork, galley styles and manuscript lettering. He owned a copy of Bain’s classic manual: CELTIC ART The Methods of Construction. Still in print, this remains the key text on the subject.

The Ritchies died in 1941, in the same week. Tributes spoke of Iona Celtic Art as ‘a lasting memorial’ to their life together, a collaboration that was ‘loyal to the noble and illustrious traditions of Iona’. Iain MacCormick died in 1998. In the 100 years since the Ritchies married, Iona had seen a remarkable flowering of creativity that directly honoured the island’s past. Moreover, Iain had generously gifted to a younger relative, artist Mhairi Killin, masters for a range of Ritchie silver pieces. This was to give her new island business, now Aosdana Gallery, a solid start. Thus, a continuing tradition of Celtic art on Iona was ensured.

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