Gordon,

 

Following on from your comment in the Pinkie House topic regarding the Billings' prints, why do you think there are so few on the web?

 

Heatons of Tisbury has a number of these for sale, including one of Caerlaverock Castle. I have not purchased any of these prints because they are too large to fit in my acid-free album.

I don't think that many books were produced originally. I 've been trying to confirm a snippet of information from the dark recesses of my memory, that the National Museum of Scotland has publishing rights and are copyright holders for most of his Scottish work. He has done some English sites, I found a print of Durham Cathedral on-line. I haven't found anything yet to confirm the museums thing, and I might be getting confused with Slezer, they do have the copyright on his work.....it is in some circumstances possible to copyright such work beyond the normal 60 years rule, particularly if you have a virtual monopoloy on source material.

Pic of the bindings of Stanford University's copy of the book.

 

There do seem to be a few prints available at Heatons, some sourced and credited to the book. The ones I'd found previously were credited as engravings by other people from Billing's drawings.

In addition, Florida State University have the four volume set and there are no doubt others elsewhere.

I think I must have been getting confused with Slezer, although a lot of his stuff is shown on-line, so I can't explain why there is so relatively few of Billing's drawings on-line.

A wee bit explaining how Billing's work influenced Scottish Architecture in the Victorian era.

David Bryce

Thanks for all that Gordon. If I find any of his works (decent images) I'll post them here.

I searched for RW Billings and got maybe 1/2 dozen images, only Cawdor & Kildrummy were castles, but search for the book produced a few more, almost all at Heatons, and 3 at Scran.

I'm not sure that the images on line do his work justice, but yes, it would be good. I'll do some too.

We need to convert most of the images, they are BMPs.

 

 

Dirleton x2

 

 

Pinkie

 

 

Tantallon

Also Wintoun House.

Huntly Castle

Elcho

 

Huntly

 

Ruthven

 

Castle Stuart x2

 

Tantallon#2

 

Tolquhon

 

Winton House