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countryside ringed by open moor. Sheep scutter about the hills, the river cuts through deep chasms, trees offer shelter in deep groves. The village is a gaggle of
curiously tall cottages on each side of a road to nowhere in particular. A friendly place with fewer than one hundred inhabitants, and most of them in those days born in the parish. It got its name from the roofless medieval church which had been the chief Scottish seat of the Knights Templar before that powerful military order was suppressed in 1312. The village kirkyard boasts a gravestone, erected in I847, which bears the entire last will and testament of a local cleric. Temple’s only other claim to fame, is made modestly on a stone set in the front wall of his cottage, saying: ‘Sir William Gillies 1898-1973 lived and worked here.’The cottage offered the family comfortable living accommodation and Gillies a studio and garden. These were valuable bonuses. But if he had written a list of painting subjects which would appeal to him – gently undulating hill country dotted with bonny hamlets, drystane dykes, steep screes, tracts of trees and water, moody skies, and the quaint hugger-mugger of a village street – surely he would have hoped for too much to find them all in one place. Yet there they were on his doorstep.
W. Gordon Smith, 1991
Sir William Gillies is still highly underrated in Modern British terms. Born in Haddington, he trained and taught at Edinburgh College of Art, and did the latter as principal. He was a great influence on many of the next generation of the Edinburgh School. He himself studied in Paris with Andre Lhote and absorbed, variously, the work of Munch, Matisse, Braque and Bonnard. Still life and landscape oils tend to be composed studio pieces of subtle complexity. Watercolours are lyrically observed renderings of the Scottish Borders based on decisive pencil or pen drawings or for larger works, executed alla prima. Gillies had a long and fruitful relationship with The Scottish Gallery which continues in the secondary market.
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