An early version of Methods of Construction (3)

Intriguingly this isn’t exactly the same as any of the illustrations in the Knotwork Panels section of Bain’s Celtic Art, Methods of Construction. It seems that this is for an earlier version, prepared in 1935 but not published. This and the others were drawn at least ten years before his work finally appeared as a series of seven booklets.

George Bain’s booklets were published by William Maclellan of Glasgow in 1945. They cover the same themes as those in the book, which was eventually printed in 1951. But the booklets were small and landscape in shape, so Bain had to prepare new illustrations for them. Nevertheless, in the 1935 and 1945 drawings of this sequence he used almost exactly the same opening words. He describes how Pictish designers created an interlacing band with a single strand.

Another illustration takes the drawing one step further. But intriguingly Bain draws completely different examples to those in the later publications. Nevertheless, both examples show how knotwork panels could be developed.