Temple of Apollo by Ian Hamilton Finlay is a neoclassical-style sculpture. A text inscribed in gold runs around the base of the temple’s dome, reworking the opening of Walter Pater’s 1893 text ‘Apollo in Picardy’ to attach his words to Saint-Just: ‘Consecutive upon Apollo a titanic revolt in his heart… a god definitively in exile – L. A. St-Just.’

Made of Portland stone, Temple of Apollo was originally conceived for Little Sparta, Finlay’s garden located in the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh. Not happy with its ‘grandness’, Finlay originally cast the temple aside. He was happy to later find the perfect poetic site for the temple at Jupiter Artland. The temple was adapted for its new location by the addition of the dome and gold inscription.

Alongside Temple of Apollo, Jupiter Artland’s permanent collection includes three other artworks by Finlay: Beehives, Only Connect and Xth Muse.

Biography

Ian Hamilton Finlay CBE was an artist, poet, philosopher, gardener and landscape designer. He is now internationally recognised for his work in each of these art forms. He was born in 1925 in the Bahamas. He was sent to boarding school in Scotland and continued to live there for the rest of his life.

Finlay left school at the age of 13 and had a wide variety of jobs from fisherman and shepherd to soldier and farm labourer, all of which had an influence on his later work. The intermediary stage in his development from writer to artist was his concrete poetry, which demonstrated a ‘formalist purity with a polemical edge’. Much of his writing was published through the Wild Hawthorn Press which he co-founded in 1961.

Poetry is at the heart of all of Finlay’s work and a further expression of this was the creation of Little Sparta, his garden near Edinburgh. The garden is on a windswept hill and blends classical sculpture with his unique use of language. At every turn, plaques, walls, statues, bridges and paving stones carry poetic and philosophical inscriptions reflecting the enduring themes of Finlay’s art.

Finlay was awarded honorary degrees or professorships from Aberdeen, Heriot-Watt, Glasgow and Dundee Universities, the SAC’s Creative Scotland Award, and a CBE in 2002. His work had received a steady stream of critical attention since the mid-1960s and by the time of his death, in 2006, he was recognised as a major contributor to modern art.