Far From the madding crowd
ian scott massie
4th october - 31st December
A collection of six original watercolours on the theme of Far From the Madding Crowd.
This is one of many famous quotations from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
"The poem was written at Stoke Poges churchyard, a little north of Slough. Gray was hearing the bell of the curfew tower at Windsor Castle a few miles away as evening falls. I loved the poem when I was a teenager, visited the churchyard at sunset and it still all feels so familiar to me - the South Buckinghamshire landscape, the yew trees, the elaborate tombs and the mounds marking where the poor were buried, the silent owl, the whirring .flight of the beetle, the twittering of the swallows. It is parochial and yet universal because of its very human message that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave” and that pomp and poverty are meaningless in the face of death.
When I was asked to paint something inspired by the quotation I thought of some of my other favourite lines and how they could be envisioned with Masham's churchyard and the Dale’s landscape - the sunset light, the ploughed furrows, the glorious uplift of “incense-scented dawn” and the rich and poor buried together, equal at last in death." Ian Scott Massie 2024
This is one of many famous quotations from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
"The poem was written at Stoke Poges churchyard, a little north of Slough. Gray was hearing the bell of the curfew tower at Windsor Castle a few miles away as evening falls. I loved the poem when I was a teenager, visited the churchyard at sunset and it still all feels so familiar to me - the South Buckinghamshire landscape, the yew trees, the elaborate tombs and the mounds marking where the poor were buried, the silent owl, the whirring .flight of the beetle, the twittering of the swallows. It is parochial and yet universal because of its very human message that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave” and that pomp and poverty are meaningless in the face of death.
When I was asked to paint something inspired by the quotation I thought of some of my other favourite lines and how they could be envisioned with Masham's churchyard and the Dale’s landscape - the sunset light, the ploughed furrows, the glorious uplift of “incense-scented dawn” and the rich and poor buried together, equal at last in death." Ian Scott Massie 2024
