Basil Chisholm Skinner, M.A.

Basil Skinner, the son of an advocate, was born in Edinburgh on 7 November 1923 and educated at the Edinburgh Academy. After wartime service in the Normandy campaign as a lance-corporal in the East Riding of Yorkshire Yeomanry and later in the Intelligence Corps, Skinner went up to Edinburgh University to read history and was awarded the Cousin Prize in fine art. From 1951 to 1954 he was librarian of the Glasgow School of Art and was then appointed an assistant keeper in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Both the gallery and Skinner benefited considerably from this period: the gallery from his academic approach, combined with the exclusively painterly considerations that had previously operated; and Skinner from his every day contact with seventeenth and eighteenth-century Scottish portraiture and topographical painting. In 1966 he obtained a lecturership in the Department of Adult Education and Extra Mural Studies at Edinburgh University and was appointed head of the department and director of extra mural studies in 1975. He published widely in learned journals and was responsible for the preparation and presentation of major exhibitions for the Scottish Arts Council, the National Galleries of Scotland and other bodies throughout his career. Most notable were `Scots in Italy in the Eighteenth Century' at the Portrait Gallery in 1963, (followed by a book of the same title in 1966); `Shakespeare in Scottish Art' for the Arts Council, also in 1963; `Sir Walter Scott' Bicentenary Exhibition in Parliament Hall in 1971; `King James VI and I' for the Edinburgh Festival in 1975 and `Scott and his Illustrators' in the MacRobert Centre, Stirling, in 1979. With the late Marquis of Linlithgow, Skinner was instrumental in setting up a preservation trust to secure the future of the Adam mansion at Hopetoun, including the collections and the Hope family archives, and he was equally active in the field of industrial archaeology. His publications include: The Cramond Iron Works (1968); The Lime Industry in Lothian (1969); and The Police in East Lothian (1970). He played a prominent role in the campaign against a proposal by Stirlingshire County Council to fill in a five-mile stretch of the Union Canal and in 1977 published A Report on the Union Canal. Skinner gave freely of his time and talents: he was honorary secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 1966-78; chairman of the Scottish Development Agency Conservation Committee 1984-9; chairman of the Hopetoun House Preservation Trust 1979-84; member of the executive committee of the National Trust for Scotland; trustee of the Sir Patrick Geddes Memorial Trust, council member of the Cockburn Association and president of the Old Edinburgh Club, 1992-4. He was a vigorous opponent of the proposal, now rescinded, to move the Scottish National Portrait Gallery to Glasgow and was elected an honorary member of the Saltire Society shortly before his death on 5 April 1995.