Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was one of the most original artists of the twentieth century. Early in his career he was Britain’s foremost concrete poet and his approach to his work – whatever the material he used, whether wood, stone, neon, bronze or paper – remained that of a poet giving form to ideas. Using a conjunction of word and image he creates an emblematic use of reference and metaphor whose adopted form is most often that of the idyll, where opposites suggest a harmony or structure to a view of the world.

In 1961 Finlay established the Wild Hawthorn Press to publish and distribute his and other poets’ work, but over the years the Press came to concentrate on Finlay’s own output. The display cases in this gallery bring together two themes within his work. Boat names evoke the activity of fishing and the landscape of sea, sky and distant land, conveying, in the words of critic Yves Abrioux, ‘the metaphorical implication that the boats enact a pastoral idyll on the high seas’. In the other case, the language and principles of neoclassicism are paired with the example of the social and political upheavals of the French Revolution. For Finlay the epic and pastoral visions of Virgil correspond to Rousseau’s combination of revolutionary political theory and his evocation of gardens and landscape.

This display has been devised by curator Andrew Wilson.

BP British Art Displays 1500-2011)