George Bain’s Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction, first published in 1951, has been a touchstone for anyone interested in Celtic art ever since. But what preceded Bain’s work? I’ll take the opportunity here to look back to earlier work, and also to explore briefly some of the other artists who worked with Bain’s publisher, William Maclellan.

Speaker Bio : Murdo Macdonald is emeritus professor of history of Scottish art at the University of Dundee, and author of Scottish Art (Thames and Hudson, 2000, 2021), Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and Ruskin’s Triangle (Ma Bibliothèque, 2021). His most recently published chapter is ‘Robert Burns and the Visual Arts: Portraiture, National Landscapes, and the Context of Monuments’ in The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns (Oxford University Press, 2024).