Exhibitions
Upcoming exhibitions in 2025
The 250th Anniversary of Cupar Curling Club
Celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2025 Cupar Curling Club is the tenth oldest club in Scotland. Evidently therefore curling is an ancient game played when the ground was too hard to dig and water frozen solid. It vies with golf as the country’s oldest sport. For this display the museum has sourced a number of pictures, trophies and other items from Cupar Curling Club, and set up a full-sized model of a Victorian curler in action. Cupar Heritage is also grateful to the Scottish Curling Trust for the loan of artefacts, notably an ancient ‘loofie’ stone, some brooms and an engraving of a painting of the Grand Match played on Linlithgow Loch in 1848. The picture is doubly important because it was the work of by Cupar-born artist Charles Lees.
Charles Lees
The artist Charles Lees is featured in pictures based around a self-portrait of the artist that Cupar Heritage acquired a few years ago. It is on special display this year because it has recently been restored thanks to a grant received from the Idlewild Trust. Situated alongside is a portrait of Lees as a young man by fellow artist Robert Scott Lauder. Displayed in addition to these pictures and the curling Grand Match, is a print of Lees’ most celebrated work, a golf match at St Andrews in 1847 and a painting of Baberton House near Edinburgh. This was the family home of Elizabeth Christie who, to dismay of her father, eloped with Lees. This group of pictures could be the largest display of work by Charles Lees ever assembled.
Arts and Artists
Complementing Charles Lees is a display of artists from the area. These include Sir David Lindsay of the Mount whose play Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis, performed for the first time in Cupar in 1552, is regarded as a tour-de-force of medieval theatre. Another great visual artist was Sir David Wilkie from Cults. In music Rab Noakes was a leading exponent of folk/rock and the children’s entertainers The Singing Kettle were very popular. Leslie Starke drew cartoons for satirical magazines like Punch, but a couple of drawings also show his promise as teenager. A different kind of visual artist was postman/photographer, George Normand. Henrietta Keddie wrote many novels under the pen name of Sarah Tytler and Robert Duncan Milne was a pioneer of science fiction writing. It’s a remarkable assemblage of artistic talent.
A Dress Made in Cupar
The Te Manawa Museum in New Zealand has in their collection an elegant mourning dress made in Cupar about the 1870s. They wanted to know more about it, so contacted Cupar Heritage. Our volunteers got to work and pieced together the story of the dressmaker, the family who owned the dress, their connections to New Zealand and the subsequent owners of the dress who donated it to the Te Manawa Mueum. The story of the dress, along with pictures and dressmaking tools, form a special display of one of those subjects that museums rarely show.
Story of Cupar
The semi-permanent Story of Cupar display remains largely unaltered although there are a few additions relating to church and school.