Mapping the WS Society’s early history 

This week saw the beginning of a new project to catalogue the seventeenth and eighteenth century unbound paper archive of the WS Society and Signet Library, with this material being added to the existing online catalogue of bound WS Society and Signet Library archive records created during the COVID years.  

Interesting things are already emerging: bar bills from early Georgian WS Society events; maintenance records giving light onto the still largely unknown first home of the WS Society in Writers Court;  and evidence of early Signet Library donations and acquisitions.  

But perhaps the most exciting is a pair of receipts concerned with the acquisition of the WS Society’s portrait of the writer and donor of the Signet Library’s first book, George Dallas WS of St Martins (1636-1701). For centuries it has been believed that the painting is a copy in oils of an original by the Flemish artist Sir John Medina, who settled in Scotland with his family in 1694. The receipts throw up new information about the picture’s provenance – and raise new questions as to the origins of the original painting.