Paper binding for ‘The National Burns’

John Leighton

1879–80

Paper binding

Signed

Leighton projects Burns’s poetry in the form of Scottish bards placed within a frame of Renaissance architecture to visualize his status as a national poet and hero: a neat conflation of the writer’s folk-origins with the more elevated traditions of lyrical writing, fusing Scots and Classicism, learning with lore.

Photograph © The British Library Board, reproduced with permission, and text by Simon Cooke [Click on image to enlarge it, and mouse over the text for links.]