Pencil, ink and painted media on paper and linen, 1922
Sir Robert Lorimer (1864-1929)
RCAHMS: Lorimer and Matthew Collection
At the end of the First World War, the scale of suffering and loss was without parallel.
Individuals and communities sought to commemorate those that they had lost through erecting memorials, and the skills of artists and architects were called upon to express this need for remembrance.
A crowd of 20,000 assembled at the unveiling of Paisley’s war memorial in 1924, to commemorate the 1,953 men of Paisley who died on active service in the Great War.
The memorial was designed by Sir Robert Lorimer, one of Scotland’s leading architects and designer of the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle. Surmounting the tall plinth is a bronze sculpture, ‘The Spirit of the Crusades’, by Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams, depicting a mounted knight, accompanied by his modern-day counterparts, four grim, tin-hatted and caped infantrymen.