Science, mathematics and art come together to celebrate three anniversaries. The Scottish mathematician Hugh Blackburn. who invented the double pendulum that produces a pattern-drawing Harmonograph, was born 200 years ago. So was his wife, the talented painter and ornithological illustrator Jemima Blackburn, a favourite cousin of the physicist James Clerk Maxwell. She was related through her mother to the first major Scottish woman portrait painter, Katherine Read, born a century earlier, in 1723. Like her Orcadian friend, the engraver Sir Robert Strange, Katherine Read spent part of her career as a Jacobite in exile in Paris and Rome. Art historian Prof. Frances Fowle is joined by mathematics historian Dr Isobel Falconer to explore these richly colourful lives and times.

In association with The Royal Society of Edinburgh

Images:

Katherine Read, Willielma Campbell, Lady Glenorchy (1741-1786), 1762, Dundee Art Galleries and Museums
Jemima Blackburn, A Gull’s Nest 1857, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow
Jemima Blackburn, Hugh Blackburn photographing Isabella and Jemima at the back door, Ardmillan, 1852, National Galleries Scotland