It was a busy and intersting meeting at Anstruther Rotary this week when we welcomed new member Anthony Lodge and enjoyed a fascinating talk by Rotarian Bill Henderson. This was followed by a meeting of Council for office bearers. We were also delighted to welcome Jimmy Spankie, president of St Andrews Rotary, who was visiting.

Professor Anthony Lodge became our newest member when he was formally inducted into Rotary International by President Alistair Graham. Anthony, who lives in Carnbee, has enjoyed a very successful career in academia in several universities throughout the UK and is currently Emeritus Professor at the School of Modern Languages in the University of St Andrews.

Club member Bill Henderson then gave a very interesting talk about James McIntosh Patrick, who was a Scottish painter and celebrated for his finely observed paintings of the Angus landscape and Dundee, Scotland, where he was based for most of his life (1907-1998).

Born in Dundee, the son of an architect and amateur artist who encouraged his son to draw and paint, he studied painting at Glasgow School of Art from 1924 to 1928 and in Paris. He continued his interest in etching which was very popular in the 1920s and was to prove a source of income for him during the Depression years. Foremost a landscape painter, he began his career producing highly finished etchings, but when the market for these collapsed in the 1930s he turned towards painting in watercolour and oil.

He produced portraits and still life works but is known mainly for his paintings of cultivated landscapes in the Scottish countryside. They are often very wide in scope yet meticulously detailed. In this he has been compared to Bruegel. Bill explained that Patrick’s style was traditional but his use of colour could be bold, as were some compositional aspects of several of his paintings.  Bill went on to explain that, less unconventionally, his landscapes frequently make use of lanes, roads, waterways or other features leading from foreground to middle distance or beyond, drawing the viewer into the picture.

Bill informed everyone that Patrick’s works are displayed at such venues as McManus Galleries and Museum, Dundee, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Glasgow Art Gallery, Edinburgh City Art Centre, Manchester Art Gallery, the National Gallery of South Africa, National Gallery of South Australia, the Sydney Art Gallery, and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. A vote of thanks was given by Ian Kennedy.