Hospitalfield. A place dedicated to contemporary art and ideas in the Scottish landscape

Hospitalfield is a residence for artists, the first in Scotland and one of the first in Europe, which was formally launched in 1902. A place that has drawn a steadfast sense of hospitality from the unswerving priorities of its past and where this same vision of its role is today condensed in the buildings it occupies and its carefully tended gardens, dedicated to art and education and bound inseparably to its sense both of belonging to the Scottish landscape and of being open to the contemporary world.

A microcosm set in an agricultural landscape, Hospitalfield lies just outside Arbroath on the east coast of Scotland. This special place, immersed in the quiet of nature and within sight of the North Sea, also sparked the imagination of the writer Walter Scott.
Hospitalfield House is an impressive building surrounded by ancient trees, which stands near sand dunes and is made of the locally quarried Old Red Sandstone that can also be seen in the cliffs a short distance to the north. It relates above all, however, to the famously fertile surrounding rural landscape where a wealthy family, that of Patrick and Elizabeth Allan-Fraser, used their fortune in the mid-19th century, to begin a process of commissioning and collecting art and then to establishing an educational programme prioritising art and the cultural and social development of a territory poised between centre and periphery.

One of its characteristics is its function as a place where, as its name suggests, hospitality has always been of central significance. In the Middle Ages the site was occupied by the St John the Baptist Hospital, founded in 1260 by the monastic community of the important Benedictine Abbey of Arbroath; now this function finds expression in its relations with the world of contemporary art and its various idioms, and with the local community, including its schools and a vast number of visitors.
Central to the life of Hospitalfield is its programme of residencies for artists and exhibiting their work. Equally important is the conservation, appreciation and interpretation of the Fraser collections – which have been enhanced with many new works over the years –, of the library and the archive. And the centre maintains an intense interest in ecological matters, in contemporary environmental emergencies and in many other areas.