James Smith at Hamilton: a Study in Scottish Classicism

Despite the revived attention that James Smith's (ca. 1645–1731) career has received since Howard Colvin's 1974 study of his Palladian drawings, his life and his work remain stubbornly enigmatic. An architect working in late seventeenth-century Scotland, Smith was a member of the Scots College of Rome before renouncing his Catholic faith and devoting himself to the creation of some of the country's most important architecture of the post-Restoration period. A scarcity of concrete evidence about his European architectural training contributes to his mystique, though progressive movements in the field of Scottish architectural history indicate that this dearth will be rectified in due course. Still, the extraordinarily varied character of his known works refutes easy categorization into the simplified brackets of ‘Baroque', ‘Palladian', or the more contentious ‘Neoclassical', and so makes a coherent assessment of style difficult.