A rarely seen immense nine-panel mural depicting scenes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland will be open to all this Saturday with the aim of igniting interest in restoring it to its former glory as one of the most important public artworks in Scotland.

2011 is the centenary of the School Decoration Exhibition curated by Patrick Geddes in Edinburgh. It is also the eightieth anniversary of the opening of Wardie Primary School on Granton Road, Edinburgh and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the painting of the mural in its hall. Yet, outside the current and former staff and pupils of Wardie School not many people realise the huge paintings are even there.

This Saturday, October 29th, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project ‘The Decorated School Network’ is joining forces with the school to celebrate the mural with a day devoted to the artwork and the significance of adorning our schools with striking imagery.

The day has been organised by Dr Jeremy Howard of St Andrews University, who said: "The challenges with works of school art are numerous. Preserving is one issue. Recording and recognising their public and artistic values others. This mural is one of only a handful of school artworks created in the 1930s as part of a public art programme sponsored by Edinburgh College of Art, and in particular its Principal Hubert Wellington. It is also important because it is designed to stimulate ongoing aesthetic, emotional and/or intellectual responses from the thousands of children going through Wardie Primary School over the last 75 years and in the future. Perhaps it can be said to be owned by those children."

Wardie Primary School opened in 1931 and five years later, under the 'Schools Beautiful' scheme initiated by Edinburgh Education Committee and Edinburgh College of Art, a postgraduate Andrew Grant Fellow of ECA, Robert Heriot ('Peter') Westwater (1905-62), painted the Wardie mural of Alice in Wonderland. Appreciation of Westwater's contribution to Scottish and British art history is long overdue. He was a major mid-century portrait painter, inspiration to Norman Reid (future director of the Tate), an early broadcaster on art for the BBC, and a prolific art critic and teacher. The Alice mural is the first of Westwater's ventures into large-scale wall painting. It was followed by his mural decoration of the ICI Pavilion at the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow and, in 1939, of a mural in the workers' lecture hall at Musselburgh Wire Mills.

The 'Schools Beautiful' programme was cut short by the Second World War. In Edinburgh, as far as is currently known, at least four schools benefitted - Craigmillar Primary School (John Maxwell's and Alexander Inglis's murals, 1935 and 1939 respectively), Prestonfield Primary School (Tom Whalen's bronze fountain group, 1935), Cameron House Nursery School (William Wilson's stained glass panels) and Wardie. The Moray House School of Education also gained a mosaic panel by William Macaulay. The social optimism of the project continued a trend for art to be educational (and healing) advocated by Patrick Geddes from the early days of mass education in the 1880s, coincided with the ideas of the mid-twentieth century champion of responsible modern British art, Herbert Read, and was continued in a rich vein of artworks incorporated into the newly built 'functionalist' schools of the 1950s to 1970s.

The Decorated School project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for two years to highlight the signficant roles played by school artworks. Details of its activities can be found at: http://thedecoratedschool.blogspot.com/. The Network is establishing a database of artworks in educational environments. It encourages participation, and welcomes information and/or news about such works.

For further information contact: Dr Jeremy Howard, University of St Andrews, jch2@st-andrews.ac.uk or Dr Catherine Burke, University of Cambridge, cb552@cam.ac.uk.

Images can be viewed on the research project blog at
http://thedecoratedschool.blogspot.com/2011/09/wardie-school-edinburgh-and-its-alice_21.html

High resolution images are available by contacting Jake Gilmore, image copyright Professor Jeremy Howard.

Notes for Editors

AHRC Media contact: Jake Gilmore, Communications Manager, 01793 416021; j.gilmore@ahrc.ac.uk  

Seminar/Discussion Day, Wardie School, Edinburgh, October 29 2011

Wardie School
Bringing Art into Schools in the early Twentieth Century: How Wardie’s Alice in Wonderland Mural Works
Wardie School, Granton Road, Edinburgh
Saturday 29 October 2011
Programme
10.30 Arrivals and Refreshments
11.00 Introductions – Representatives of The Decorated School Research Network and Wardie School
11.15 Wardie’s Mural: Why it is Special, its Artist (RH Westwater) and its ‘Art in Schools’ Context (Jeremy Howard, Art History, University of St Andrews)
12.00 Wardie School and its Architectural Context (Diane Watters, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland)
12.25 Open Discussion – Participation with the Mural: ‘Uses, Abuses and Opinions – of Adults and Children’
12.55 LUNCH (£5)
1.40 Educating Children’s Artistic Eye: ‘Art at School’ (France 19-20 Centuries) (Prof Annie Renonciat, Musée National de l’Education, Rouen and Université Paris Diderot 7)
2.05 Wardie’s Mural – Issues of Conservation (Fiona Allardyce/Karen Dundas, Scottish Wall Painting Conservators)
2.20-3.15 Open Discussions
3.15-3.30 Thoughts on the Day, Future Work, Thanks and Close

The panels depict the following scenes from the book:
Top Left - horizontal panel of Alice Falling Asleep while her sister reads a 'dry' book (Chapter One)
Bottom Left - vertical panel of The Game of Croquet with the Queen, King and Knave of Hearts (Chapter Eight)
Top Mid Left - horizontal panel of Alice, the Hookah-smoking Caterpillar and the Mushroom (Chapter Five)
Bottom Mid Left - vertical panel of Alice with animals wondering how to get dry (Chapter Three)
Centre - vertical panel with Alice and the Rabbit at the bottom of the Tunnel. Complete with Marmalade Jar and Golliwog (the latter, not being in Alice in Wonderland could be a cunning advertisement for Robertson's Jams and Marmalades?) (Chapter One)
Top Mid Right - horizontal panel of the Gryphon and Mock Turtle dancing the Lobster Quadrille (Chapter Ten)
Bottom Mid Right - vertical panel of Alice being grinned at and instructed by the Cheshire Cat (Chapter Six)
Top Right - horizontal panel of Alice awoken by her sister (Chapter Six)
Bottom Right - vertical panel of the Tea Party with the Mad Hatter, March Hare, Dormouse and Fish Footman (Chapter Seven)

The Decorated School Research network
The network is researching the relationships between architects, artists and educators through the art which became part of the fabric of school buildings and their immediate environments in the 20th century. The project is interested in understanding more about how the art came to be commissioned, how the subject matter was decided, what was its function, its life story and what ideas about education or childhood, if any, were intended to be conveyed.

The research is funded by the Arts and Humanites Research Council and is led by Dr Catherine Burke, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge and Dr Jeremy Howard, Art History, University of St Andrews. The day at Wardie is the second of 4 seminars, open to the public, at sites of significant interest taking place during 2011-12. For details of the others, see http://thedecoratedschool.blogspot.com/.

Project Partners
Peter Blundell-Jones, School of Architecture,University of Sheffield
Peter Cunningham, Homerton College, University of Cambridge
Ian Grosvenor, School of Education,University of Birmingham
Roy Kozlovsky, School of Architecture, Northeastern University, USA
Kirk Niergarth, Art Historian, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
Annie Renonciat, visual education historian, Musée National de l'Education, Rouen, and Université Paris Diderot 7Andrew Saint, architectural historian, English Heritage
Deborah Wakely, architect, ARK,
Diane Watters, Buildings Investigator, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland
Jon Wood, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
Andrew Demetrius, Visual Resources Curator, School of Art History, University of St Andrews

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): Each year the AHRC provides approximately £100 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes hundreds of research awards ranging from individual fellowships to major collaborative projects as well as over 1,100 studentship awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.