Xth Muse by Ian Hamilton Finlay features a sculpted head of the poet Sappho, standing eight feet high on a slim column of Portland stone.

Sappho was a Greek poet, known for her lyric poetry which was written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given the name ‘Tenth Muse’ and ‘The Poetess’. Most of her poetry is now lost, or only survives in fragmentary form. She is also a well known symbol of love and desire between women, with the words sapphic and lesbian deriving from her name and that of her home island, Lesbos.

Mounted on her plinth, Jupiter Artland’s Xth Muse can be seen through the columns of Temple of Apollo, another sculpture in the Jupiter Artland collection that was made by Finlay. This was a conscious decision and the realisation of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s words: ‘one work begats another’.

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

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.