David and June Gordon Lecture: Robert Burns and Fine Arts – An Extraordinary Legacy

Professor Murdo Macdonald is author of Scottish Art in Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series. He is a former editor of Edinburgh Review. His research interests include Robert Burns and art, the art of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd, and the cultural milieu of the Celtic Revivalist and ecologist Patrick Geddes (not least with respect to cognate revivals in India and Japan). He has a longstanding research interest in James Macpherson’s Ossian as a point of origin of the Celtic Revival. As part of that research in 2013 he identified (with Eric Shanes) a lost Ossian work by J M W Turner. He is at present writing a book on the Scottish intellectual and cultural dimensions of Patrick Geddes. The subject of his lecture: ‘Robert Burns And Fine Art – An Extraordinary Legacy’ is directly related to his current work for the Oxford Companion to Robert Burns.

He was appointed an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture in 2009, and an honorary fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies in 2016. He is Emeritus Professor of History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee.