Where? A trip north of the border…

I have recently returned from a visit to Scotland to see the plaster cast collections in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In Edinburgh it was the Trustees’ Academy, founded in the late eighteenth century, that built a teaching collection of plaster casts for the teaching of drawing. This collection was augmented when the Academy shifted its institutional identity under the Department of Science and Art from 1858. The casts are now distributed between Edinburgh College of Art, the Scottish National Gallery and the University of Edinburgh.

Heading west, I visited the Glasgow School of Art, where the curator Peter Trowles was kind enough to share his knowledge of their extensive collections. The archive of the GSA is particularly rich in the ephemera related to the acquisition of plaster casts, with a wealth of useful invoices and correspondence from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was particularly gratifying to see several Brucciani casts dating from the same period as those here at the Museum of Classical Archaeology. I am also grateful to the Archives and Collections Assistant, Michelle Kaye, for locating some fascinating archival material that will really help to contextualise my research in Cambridge.

Naukydes Discobolos
At Edinburgh College of Art, with additional headgear…

Naukydes Discobolos
At Glasgow School of Art, he’s ‘armless…