Posted at 13:47h
in
Miscellany
London: Jonathan Cape, 1986
21.4 x 14.7cm, 5664pp plus original boards and pictorial dust jacket. First edition of this "guide" to "follies". This was the book that made Finlay so angry because of the short review of Stoneypath (later Little Sparta) and his ire is understandable. The paragraph reads:
Near the village of DUNSYRE about two miles west of the Peebles-Lanark border is Stoneypath, a bogland garden developed from 1967 onwards by the peet Ian Hamilton Finlay. it is a fine and justly famed new garden, but although there isd an Apollo Temple, a broken column or two, and an avalanche of poetic mottoes and inscriptions, the insistent namedropping of pastoral painters and writers and garden theorists tend to get on one's nerves. Everything in Stoneypath is on such a small and fragile scale that one starts hankering for something more manly, like a Wallace monument or a sturdy Gothick eye catcher."
Given Little Sparta has been voted by artists, critics and the general public to be the greatest Scottish artwork of modern times, it is fair to judge Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp harshly. Their comment " insistent namedropping" is crass and clearly shows that the works they saw were beyond their capabilities. VG+.
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