Neil Livingston Collection
The art legacy that's like a journey through the moods and people of Scotland
Neil Livingston (1920-2010) approached Maggie's in 2001. He’d heard that Frank Gehry was designing a cancer caring centre at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee and wanted to explore the idea of moving some of his collection of Scottish paintings to a new home.
The collection that Neil and his wife Georgina (1912-2002) had collected was extraordinary in the way it represented Scotland in all its manifestations. There were storms at sea and calm harbours, winter scenes, the silvery thin air of a 'First Thaw' and 'Cornstooks' by George Houston, and 'Autumn in the Uplands' by John Goudie.
Typically generous, they decided quite quickly to donate the entire collection to Maggie's. They understood how important it was for people who were having a difficult time in their lives to have windows opened up for them into different worlds.
Neil and Georgina were both born and bred in Scotland. He in Charlestown, Fife; she in St Cyrus, Angus. They met while working at the Ministry of Works in Edinburgh and married in 1953.
From his job as an architectural assistant, Neil was seconded to the smaller but more focused drawing office of Ancient Monuments, which later became Historic Scotland. This was a job that suited Neil perfectly; visiting monuments all over Scotland and the Islands, from 3,000-year-old burial cairns to a Blackhouse, less than 100 years old. He travelled the length and breadth of Scotland, observing, drawing and recording, and he loved it. This passion shows up clearly in the collection that he and Georgina put together.
The pair's first 'serious buy', as Neil put it, was in 1966; Mardi Barrie's 'Small Sea Cliff, Orkney'. But it was after Neil retired in 1980 that they became major collectors. Every aspect of owning paintings and artworks became a passion.
They loved finding their treasures in galleries all over Scotland. And they enjoyed the subsequent sleuthing; finding out everything they could about the artist, the subject and the location. They travelled to the Northern and Western Isles to find the exact places their paintings depicted and they enjoyed meeting some of the contemporary artists whose work they bought.
Marcia Blakenham, Maggie’s Vice-Chair, said this of Neil at his memorial service in January 2010:
‘It was typically generous and imaginative of you to want to share your treasure, to embrace the idea that your paintings would enhance the lives of other people and to ask us to take them away while you were still enjoying them
'It was a great privilege to know and admire you and you will be missed and remembered for what you were, for your sardonic sense of humour, for what you have done with your life and for what you have left behind.’
Find out more about leaving a legacy for Maggie's.