by The Curious Scribbler,

I wrote in January and February this year about my artist great-aunts, Jet and Aeta Jardine, whose work was due to be exhibited at the Reid Gallery, Glasgow School of Art in September 2026.  The exhibition was, unfortunately, postponed, and will now be held from 25 September to 6 November 2027.

Meanwhile though, I and Y Lolfa have published a book, A year in Glasgow 1908, which reproduces Aeta Jardine’s  sketch diary describing her life in 1908.  At the time she was resident in Kelvinside, Glasgow with her mother, her elder sister Jet, and her younger brother Nigel.  Using a bound book of paper samples from the firm of Alex Pirie and Sons Ltd, she created more than sixty studies of incidents in their lives that year. The sisters studied French at the Berlitz school in Sauchiehall Street, art at the Glasgow School of Art, enjoyed entertainments at the theatre, circus and music hall, holidayed on the windy coast at Findhorn, and went on a visit to Paris.  They swam at the Arlington baths and attended gymnastic classes.  Her acute eye and wry captions paint an engaging picture of her life, her family and the people she meets.  Young men also pass under her critical gaze:  French tutors, fellow students, her brothers’ friends, or the youths attending a Suffragette meeting.

Both sisters went on to become lifelong watercolour artists who, though never famous, regularly exhibited and sold their work.  They never married and lived in Scotland with their mother until she died aged seventy. Soon afterwards they  moved to London, and exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions.  But some of the youthful joie de vivre had disappeared by then.     Jet developed great skill in still life studies and a unique style in slightly judgemental pictures of people while Aeta concentrated on landscape scenes. ( see January and February blogs).

I produced the book in order that it could be sold at the Reid Gallery exhibition when the original sketch book was to be displayed, open at a single page, in a glass case.  That will now take place next year, but in the meantime there will be an Aberystwyth launch event, on Tuesday 27 October 5.30-7pm.  The venue will be Gosen Chapel, Rhydyfelin, where the vestry has been recently refurbished as a ballet studio.

There has been much social change in the 120 years since my great aunts were young women in the second city of empire.  Back then, Gosen Chapel was just forty years old, and had a large nonconformist congregation.  It is happy circumstance that the chapel has found a new life in the 21st century not as a carpet warehouse or house conversion, but as an elegant hall mainly devoted to dance and exercise.

The restored vestry at Capel Gosen, Rhydyfelin where the book launch will be held.