WELCOME. These pages are dedicated to JOHN CLERK OF ELDIN (1728-1812), Scottish businessman, artist and writer. Here you will find information on his life and works.

John Clerk of Eldin was a remarkable man living in a remarkable time. His friends and acquaintances included many of the most significant people of Scotland’s Age of Enlightenment – James Hutton, Adam Smith, David Hume, John Home and Dr Joseph Black, and many others. A full biography is provided.

My principal interest has always been on Clerk of Eldin’s etchings, which were the subject of  The Etchings of John Clerk of Eldin , the book I wrote and published in 2012 to mark the bicentenary of his death. The publication coincided with an exhibition I curated, seen at Edinburgh City Art Centre and The Fleming Collection, London.  Clerk’s landscape etchings were produced in a short period between 1770 and 1778. They are not only records of buildings and places, now much altered, in ruins or demolished, but also often go beyond mere topographical representation by being rendered in an aesthetic more akin to that of C17 European masters whose prints he had studied. This alone marks him out as special, and particularly so in Scotland where homegrown landscape prints were non-existent before he turned his hand to printmaking.

Clerk of Eldin’s other achievements, in naval tactics and geology, have their own dedicated pages. His Inquiry into Naval Tactics, first published privately, transformed British naval engagements in the late C18 and early C19, with the most notable successes under Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar. The geology drawings were executed for his friend James Hutton, for Hutton’s seminal book Theory of the Earth. However, they had not been used before Hutton’s death in 1797, with the book incomplete. Their loss and rediscovery 170 years later is a fine tale.

A further part of the 2012 bicentenary was to create a dedicated website – clerkofeldin.com. This was hacked into recently and some of the content interfered with. As the site was constructed using software that is now outdated and insecure, it has needed to be replaced. This turn of events has provided me with an opportunity to expand the original content with new articles, and to complete the etchings gallery. Additional content will be added as we approach the tercentenary of Clerk’s birth in 2028.

Geoffrey Bertram