John Patrick Byrne

I spent a whole day in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum a few months ago, poking into all areas of the permanent collection. A return visit was on the cards when I read highly positive reviews of a special exhibition dedicated to the life and works of John Byrne. I took a bus early on a bright autumn Saturday, the day after the death of Queen Elizabeth had been announced. It's just over a mile and a half from the city centre to the Kelvingrove and I usually walk. Basically you follow Sauchiehall Street all the way and it was certainly a nice day for it. Entry to the exhibition was £7.50 and it was housed in a basement gallery.

John Patrick Byrne was born and raised in Paisley. Now 82 years old, he has achieved success as a painter, playwright and stage designer. After graduating as best final year student from Glasgow School of Art, he studied in Italy but did not find fame and fortune instantly. He eked out a living working as a carpet designer, teaching art classes at night school and illustrating book covers for Penguin paperbacks. His break came after reading an article about the growing interest in naïve unschooled artists. He submitted a primitive painting to a London gallery, pretending it was the work of his father, Patrick. The work was well received and "Patrick" was offered a solo exhibition. When the ruse came to light, the gallery owners took it in good part and the showing was a great success. To this day, Byrne signs some of his paintings under his father's name. Or at least who he thought was his father. More of that later. Jock and the Tiger Cat (1968, pictured above) is an example of a Patrick piece of art. Today's exhibition featured the largest number of Byrne self portraits gathered in one place. He often depicted himself with fag in mouth and/or paintbrush in hand. A video presentation explained how he had received a commission in 1974 from Glasgow Council to paint a large mural on the end of a tenement block, part of a scheme to brighten up the troubled city. His effort was entitled Boy on Dog and it became a familiar site to anyone driving along the new Clydeside Expressway. The local youths however were less impressed with his efforts and frequently daubed graffiti on the lower parts of the wall. Having to paint over the unwanted messages initially annoyed Byrne but he began to see the funny side and incorporated some of the slogans into his work after the following inscription appeared: "Painter put your brush away, Tiny Partick [gang name] are here to stay". Byrne created several portraits of his great friend Billy Connolly. One was produced for the legendary comedian's 60th birthday and currently hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. A large mural in the quarter of Glasgow known as the Merchant City depicts Connolly aged 75 - based on an original painting by Byrne.

My first personal encounter with John Byrne's work was watching Tutti Frutti - a hit series he penned for TV in 1987. It tells the tale of a 60s rock n' roll band - The Majestics - reuniting for a tour which takes in some of Scotland's less salubrious venues. After the death of lead singer Big Jazza McGlone, the band is forced to rope in his younger brother Danny (played by Robbie Coltrane) and young female guitarist and vocalist Suzie Kettles (Emma Thompson). The plot centres around the offstage bickering and inter-band relationships as the Majestics lurch from one disastrous show to the next. The mainstream careers of Coltrane and Thompson were launched on the back of Tutti Frutti and I enjoyed the series as a teenager, watching it again many years later on DVD. The exhibition featured drawings of the band members: Danny, Suzie, Vinnie, Bomba & Fud. The work that led to Byrne's major breakthrough was The Slab Boys - a trilogy comprising the eponymous first part, followed by Cutting a Rug and, finally, Still Life. Published between 1978 and 1982, the narrative follows a group of young, urban, working-class Scots from the late 50s to the early 70s. The first instalment is set in the slab room of a Paisley carpet factory - a job Byrne himself had performed as a young man. The original play was staged on Broadway and featured among the cast a trio of actors who later became Hollywood stars: Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon and Val Kilmer. Byrne himself directed the film version in 1997. The gallery also featured a collage of LP album covers that Byrne had painted, including several for Gerry Rafferty and - notably - a 1980 Beatles compilation entitled Ballads. I enjoyed the music loop which featured rock n' roll standards such as Peggy Sue and Johnny B Goode. Byrne was hired in 2013 to paint the domed ceiling in the auditorium of the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of a major refurbishment programme. Together with his wife Jeanine, he even branched out into illustrated children's literature, publishing Donald and Benoit - a story about an orphaned boy who forms a friendship with a cat who can read, write, talk and play the drums. I chuckled when I saw Byrne's typewriter with the accompanying explanation that his plodding two-fingered style enabled him to think clearly as he produced text. That explains exactly why yours truly is so eloquent here! I must admit it took me a while to fully warm to the exhibition, probably because the huge array of self portraits was near the start. But I became fully absorbed, especially when the musical themes were introduced. The exhibition gave you a good sense of the man. It didn't go into Byrne's family heritage. He is in fact the product of an incestuous relationship between his mother and her own father.

Afterwards, I fancied taking in a stroll up and down the portion of the River Kelvin that snakes through Kelvingrove Park. I also planned a short detour up to the Glasgow University campus at Gilmorehill.

I had previously tackled 10 miles of the Kelvin Walkway, starting at Milngavie. This trek had ended at Kelvinbridge subway station on Great Western Road and today I would fill in the portion inside the park boundaries. The remarkable Sunlight Cottages stand high on the riverbank, just around the corner from the museum. The two dwellings have a real chocolate box or Hansel & Gretel look about them, rather out of step with urban Glasgow. Category-B listed, they are the only surviving buildings from the 1901 international exhibition held in the park. Built from red brick, with an elaborate timber-framed upper floor, some gables are jettied with dragon beams, carved bressumers and bargeboards. Very charming and a real oddity. Across the road from the museum is the cavernous Kelvin Hall, which has had many uses since its opening as an exhibition venue in 1927 (replacing an earlier structure destroyed by fire). It is now a fitness and cultural centre. Part of the premises are occupied by the National Library of Scotland and Glasgow University. Fronted in red sandstone to complement the adjacent museum, the grand building has hosted major concerts, trade and medical conferences, a slew of Scottish exhibitions, the industrial displays of the 1951 Festival of Britain, motor shows, various civic, sporting and religious rallies, world championship boxing, several seasons of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Proms and the annual Kelvin Hall Circus and Carnivals, with a full supporting cast of animals. The building served as a barrage balloon factory during the war years. From 1988 to 2010, the hall was home to the Glasgow Transport Museum and I visited the vast collection during this period. The purpose-built Riverside Museum on the banks of the Clyde now performs this function. The Kelvin Hall then became an indoor sporting arena until a £35 million refurbishment programme was carried out in 2016 which transformed the historic venue.

Visitors can make use of a modern health club. Those interested in research can browse the National Library's enormous digital archive and Glasgow University have multiple student facilities, offering an object-based approach to teaching and learning, linked to the collections of the Hunterian Museum (whose public galleries I would shortly visit on this walk). A long stairway led away from the river, up to the Gilmorehill Campus - the main site of the ancient university since 1870. Originally designed in a Gothic revival style (the second-largest example in Britain, after Westminster Palace), the once-greenfield site has expanded over the decades. The 1930s saw the construction of the award-winning round Reading Room (now Category-A listed). Several students and vistors were milling around and I took in the view of the city skyline. I wandered into the courtyard and through the cloisters towards the Hunterian Museum - the oldest in Scotland and one of the world's leading university museums, as well as a great cultural asset to the nation. Over 1.5 million objects across multiple disciplines make up the entire collection. Admission is free to the general public and I'd been once before when Nicole was on a yoga teacher training course and I was looking for something new to explore. The son a farmer, William Hunter (1718-1783) studied at Glasgow University where he came into contact with the enquiring spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment - a period following the Act of Union during which the country made great strides socially, economically and intellectually. He moved to London and entered the field of medicine, becoming a leading teacher of anatomy. He was the principal obstetrician of his day and was employed as as a royal physician to Queen Charlotte. Hunter oversaw the famous anatomy theatre and museum in Great Windmill Street, Soho, where the best British doctors and surgeons of the period were trained.

An avid collector, Hunter acquired a huge range of objects whose scope ran way beyond the areas of medicine and anatomy. His collection encompassed books, manuscripts, prints, coins, shells, zoological specimens and minerals. His library of 10,000 books is regarded as one of the finest 18th-century examples to remain intact. It wasn't just a rich man's indulgence. Hunter used the volumes to support his professional teaching and research. Around a third of the books are medical related but other topics covered include literature, language, fine printing, natural history, exploration, travel and art. Clearly a well-informed bloke! Today the library provides Glasgow University with an exceptional resource. Hunter's nephew Matthew Baillie - who is regarded as the father of pathology - inherited his uncle's house and medical school but the collection was donated to Hunter's alma mater. The first Hunterian Museum was constructed within the grounds of the Old College on High Street. This architectural gem was demolished in 1870 following the move to Gilmorehill Campus and new galleries were created as the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world transferred to its new quarters. Hunter stated that he built his collection for the improvement of knowledge. He could not possibly have envisaged the amount of information we have at our fingertips nowadays. Creating a large data bank - in whatever format - requires years of dedication and we are fortunate today that it is so much easier for learners and researchers to access the fruits of this labour. I strolled into the museum, wooden floorboards creaking underneath me. The first gallery featured a display on the Antonine Wall - a barrier (mainly turf) that stretched between the Firths of Forth and Clyde. It marked the northernmost limit of the Roman Empire. The themes of the display were the building of the wall, the role of the Roman army on the frontier, the cultural interaction between soldiers and indigenous peoples and, finally, the abandonment.

Some of the most spectacular artefacts from Roman Britain were found in the vicinity of the Antonine Wall. Completed around the year AD142 in the reign of Roman emperor Antonius Pius, the wall marked an extension of the empire into what is now the lower regions of Scotland. The turf barricade was placed on a rubble foundation and further security was provided by a ditch. The new frontier was short lived and troops may have withdrawn during the 160s AD as they were needed elsewhere in the realm. The construction of the Antonine Wall was a major engineering project and the logistics of sourcing and transporting the correct materials would have required detailed planning. Specialist workers and general labourers were present in great numbers and temporary camps erected and dismantled as the bulwark progressed. Drainage pipes had to be laid and forts needed heating systems. It must have been a great exercise in coordination, especially when you consider the only way of passing messages over long distances would have been by horse. The gallery had a selection of distance slabs. They would have been set into the wall at regular intervals, facing south towards the empire. Nineteen surviving examples are known to exist and sixteen are present in the Hunterian. Many of the stones are elaborately carved, celebrating the successful enlargement of the territory. No other Roman frontier is recorded in such precise detail. The local people of the age lived mainly in timber round houses, although wealthier families would inhabit crannogs and brochs. There is strong evidence to suggest the local tribes had a mutually beneficial relationship with the Romans. There must surely have been the odd skirmish but, by and large, the two cultures learned to live alongside each other. I find all aspects of these times fascinating and this exhibition certainly didn't disappoint.

I wandered through the main museum hall and examined the varied display cases on both levels. Diverse objects such as gemstones, scientific instruments, fossils, coins and medical equipment were included. There was also a host of ethnographic objects from Captain Cook’s Pacific voyages. I'm not sure how well known the Hunterian is known among the general public. I would hazard a guess that museums within universities tend to exist off the tourist radar. Certainly it's well worth dropping into the Hunterian if you happen to be in the area. Just outside are the impressive university cloisters, They connect the east and west quadrangles and lead inside the Gilbert Scott Building to the stunning Bute Hall, where the graduation ceremonies are held, and the Hunterian Museum. With their fluted columns and transverse ribbed vault, these impressive archways are an iconic part of the university and have been seen onscreen in many films and TV shows including Cloud Atlas and Outlander. Eventually I managed to take a picture with nobody standing inside the frame. I left the campus and took a straight course towards Great Western Road, crossing over Glasgow Street - something of a quiet backwater despite the name. I picked up the river underneath the main drag, switching to the opposite bank via an old railway bridge converted to a pedestrian walkway. A 700-yard cut-and-cover tunnel started here and ran directly below Great Western Road. I headed downstream towards the museum, alternating between the riverside and higher level paths. I passed Kelvingrove Bandstand - a sunken arena which can seat 2000 people on the curving benches. The venue reopened in 2014 after a couple of decades of decay. My final landmark of the day was the Stewart Memorial Fountain in the middle of Kelvingrove Park.

Opened in 1872 and constructed from granite, sandstone, marble and bronze, this flamboyant French-Scottish Gothic structure commemorated the late Lord Provost Robert Stewart, the man deemed most responsible for establishing Glasgow's first permanent supply of fresh water from Loch Katrine in western Perthshire. The fountain incorporates abundant imagery of the Trossachs, taken from Sir Walter Scott's narrative poem The Lady of the Lake. The verse is reckoned to have helped popularise tourism in the area now known as Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park. Sadly, the fountain fell into disrepair and a 1988 restoration scheme failed after technical problems and incessant vandalism. The iconic structure was finally restored to its former glory in 2009 and a powered water recirculation system enabled the fountain to operate sustainably. Previously it was connected to the mains and the outflow went straight into the Kelvin. It wasn't switched on today and perhaps only operates at certain times. A marvellous sight nonetheless. I'll eventually run out of things to see in Glasgow but - for now - I'm still discovering hidden treasure.