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Watt Library
The Watt Library or Watt Monument Library in Greenock, Scotland, opened on its current site in 1837 and was the direct descendant of the Greenock Library, a subscription library founded in 1783. It closed as a subscription library in 1971 and re-opened as a public facility in 1973 under the name of the Watt Library, specialising in Local History and Archives. The building was designed in the Gothic revival style by architect Sir Edward Blore and is a listed building. It has undergone recent refurbishment and re-opened in November 2019 as the Watt Institution, incorporating the McLean Museum Watt Lecture Hall and Inverclyde Archives. History The Watt Library is the direct descendant of the Greenock Library, founded in 1783 as a subscription library. James Watt was a patron of the library and on his death, members of the James Watt Club proposed erecting a memorial to him in the form of a new library building and statue. The initial drawings for the building were created at d ...
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Greenock
Greenock (; sco, Greenock; gd, Grianaig, ) is a town and administrative centre in the Inverclyde council areas of Scotland, council area in Scotland, United Kingdom and a former burgh of barony, burgh within the Counties of Scotland, historic county of Renfrewshire (historic), Renfrewshire, located in the west central Lowlands of Scotland. It forms part of a contiguous urban area with Gourock to the west and Port Glasgow to the east. The United Kingdom Census 2011, 2011 UK Census showed that Greenock had a population of 44,248, a decrease from the 46,861 recorded in the United Kingdom Census 2001, 2001 UK Census. It lies on the south bank of the Clyde at the "Tail of the Bank" where the River Clyde deepens into the Firth of Clyde. History Name Place-name scholar William J. Watson wrote that "Greenock is well known in Gaelic as Grianáig, dative of grianág, a sunny knoll". The Scottish Gaelic place-name ''Grianaig'' is relatively common, with another (Greenock) near Calla ...
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Gothic Revival Architecture
Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly serious and learned admirers of the neo-Gothic styles sought to revive medieval Gothic architecture, intending to complement or even supersede the neoclassical styles prevalent at the time. Gothic Revival draws upon features of medieval examples, including decorative patterns, finials, lancet windows, and hood moulds. By the middle of the 19th century, Gothic had become the preeminent architectural style in the Western world, only to fall out of fashion in the 1880s and early 1890s. The Gothic Revival movement's roots are intertwined with philosophical movements associated with Catholicism and a re-awakening of high church or Anglo-Catholic belief concerned by the growth of religious nonconformism. Ultimately, the "Anglo-Catholicism" t ...
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Edward Blore
Edward Blore (13 September 1787 – 4 September 1879) was a 19th-century English landscape and architectural artist, architect and antiquary. Early career He was born in Derby, the son of the antiquarian writer Thomas Blore. Blore's background was in antiquarian draughtsmanship rather than architecture, in which he had no formal training. Nevertheless, he designed Vorontsov Palace (Alupka), a large palace for Count Vorontsov in Alupka, Crimea, and important ecclesiastical furnishings designed by him included organ cases for Winchester Cathedral and Peterborough Cathedral (the Peterborough case since removed) and the choir stalls in Westminster Abbey. Charles Locke Eastlake, writing in 1872, believed that he had been apprenticed to an engraver,Eastlake 1873, p.138 but other sources dispute this. He illustrated his father's ''History of Rutland'' (1811), and over the next few years he made the drawings of York Minster, York and Peterborough and measured drawings of Wincheste ...
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McLean Museum
The McLean Museum and Art Gallery (now officially the Watt Institution) is a museum and art gallery situated in Greenock, Inverclyde, Scotland. It is the main museum in the Inverclyde area, it is free to visit and was opened in 1876. Most notably it features an exhibition of items related to James Watt, the Greenock-born inventor, a Mummy Cartonnage from Herakleopolis Magna and a collection of British and Scottish art. The principal entrance to the museum is on Kelly Street, in the Greenock West area. The forme4r Curator is Val Boa. The Watt Institution includes the Art Gallery, Watt Hall, Watt Library and Inverclyde Archives. History The Museum owes its origins to the Greenock Philosophical Society's burgeoning collection of artificial and natural curiosities which became a museum in 1816 as branch of the Society, housed in the Greenock library. When the Greenock Library changed location to the Watt Library, Society members added "autographs, maps, prints, coins, medals, and ar ...
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James Watt
James Watt (; 30 January 1736 (19 January 1736 OS) – 25 August 1819) was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder. Watt introduced a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines. Eventually, he adapted his engine to produce rotary motion, greatly broadening its use beyond pumping water. Watt attempted to commercialise his invention, but experienced great financial di ...
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William Burn
William Burn (20 December 1789 – 15 February 1870) was a Scottish architect. He received major commissions from the age of 20 until his death at 81. He built in many styles and was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial Revival,often referred to as the golden age of Scottish architecture. Life Burn was born in Rose Street in Edinburgh, the son of architect Robert Burn and his wife Janet Patterson. He was the fourth born and the eldest survivor of the 16 children born. William was educated at the High School in Edinburgh's Old Town. He started training with Sir Robert Smirke in London in 1808. This is where worked on Lowther Castle with C.R. Cockerell, Henry Roberts, and Lewis Vulliamy. After training with the architect Sir Robert Smirke, designer of the British Museum, he returned to Edinburgh in 1812. Here he established a practice from the family builders' yard. His first independant commission was in Renfrewshire. In 1812 he designed the exchange assembly rooms for the Gr ...
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Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace () is a London royal residence and the administrative headquarters of the monarch of the United Kingdom. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is often at the centre of state occasions and royal hospitality. It has been a focal point for the British people at times of national rejoicing and mourning. Originally known as ''Buckingham House'', the building at the core of today's palace was a large townhouse built for the Duke of Buckingham in 1703 on a site that had been in private ownership for at least 150 years. It was acquired by King George III in 1761 as a private residence for Queen Charlotte and became known as The Queen's House. During the 19th century it was enlarged by architects John Nash and Edward Blore, who constructed three wings around a central courtyard. Buckingham Palace became the London residence of the British monarch on the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. The last major structural additions were made in the late 19th ...
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Francis Leggatt Chantrey
Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey (7 April 1781 – 25 November 1841) was an English sculptor. He became the leading portrait sculptor in Regency era Britain, producing busts and statues of many notable figures of the time. Chantrey's most notable works include the statues of King George IV (Trafalgar Square); King George III (Guildhall), and George Washington (Massachusetts State House). He also executed four monuments to military heroes for St Paul's Cathedral, London. He left the ''Chantrey Bequest'' (or ''Chantrey Fund'') for the purchase of works of art for the nation, which was available from 1878 after the death of his widow. Life Chantrey was born at Jordanthorpe near Norton (then a Derbyshire village, now a suburb of Sheffield), where his family had a small farm. His father, who also dabbled in carpentry and wood-carving, died when Francis was twelve; and his mother remarried, leaving him without a clear career to follow. At fifteen, he was working for a grocer in Sheffiel ...
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Paradise Lost
''Paradise Lost'' is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The first version, published in 1667, consists of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse (poetry), verse. A second edition followed in 1674, arranged into twelve books (in the manner of Virgil's ''Aeneid'') with minor revisions throughout. It is considered to be Milton's masterpiece, and it helped solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of all time. The poem concerns the The Bible, biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Composition In his introduction to the Penguin Books, Penguin edition of ''Paradise Lost'', the Milton scholar John Leonard notes, "John Milton was nearly sixty when he published ''Paradise Lost'' in 1667. The biographer John Aubrey (1626–1697) tells us that the poem was begun in about 1658 and finished in about 1663. However, ...
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John Martin (painter)
John Martin (19 July 1789 – 17 February 1854) was an English Romanticism, Romantic painter, engraver and illustrator. He was celebrated for his typically vast and dramatic paintings of religious subjects and fantasy art, fantastic compositions, populated with minute figures placed in imposing landscapes. Martin's paintings, and the prints made from them, enjoyed great success with the general publicin 1821 Thomas Lawrence referred to him as "the most popular painter of his day"but were lambasted by John Ruskin and other critics. Early life Martin was born in July 1789, in a one-room cottage, at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham in Northumberland, the fourth son of Fenwick Martin, a one-time fencing master. He was apprenticed by his father to a coachbuilder in Newcastle upon Tyne to learn heraldry, heraldic painting, but owing to a dispute over wages the indentures were cancelled, and he was placed instead under Boniface Musso, an Italian artist, father of the enamel painter Charles ...
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Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics, and he is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and served as consul in 63 BC. His influence on the Latin language was immense. He wrote more than three-quarters of extant Latin literature that is known to have existed in his lifetime, and it has been said that subsequent prose was either a reaction against or a return to his style, not only in Latin but in European languages up to the 19th century. Cicero introduced into Latin the arguments of the chief schools of Hellenistic philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary ...
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Listed Library Buildings In Scotland
Listed may refer to: * Listed, Bornholm, a fishing village on the Danish island of Bornholm * Listed (MMM program), a television show on MuchMoreMusic * Endangered species in biology * Listed building, in architecture, designation of a historically significant structure * Listed company, see listing (finance), a public company whose shares are traded e.g. on a stock exchange * UL Listed, a certification mark * A category of Group races in horse racing See also * Listing (other) Listing may refer to: * Enumeration of a set of items in the form of a list * Johann Benedict Listing (1808–1882), German mathematician. * Listing (computer), a computer code listing. * Listing (finance), the placing of a company's shares on the l ...
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