Saturday 9 October 2010

More on Torosay House

I posted something on David James' house with its Nessie exhibits a while back (see link).

But here is a delightful object which I photographed when we first entered the house and alerted me to the Nessie possibilities of the place.



The image is a bit shaky but the form is unmistakeable as a model of Nessie or to be more precise the Nessiteras Rhombopteryx version of Nessie. You can see the tail to the right and the lowered head to the left.

It appeared to me to be a plaster cast of some sort and the flippers you can see were damaged in the past but repaired. I imagine it was made in the late 1970s during the media hype concerning the Rines photographs which inspired the Sir Peter Scott painting from which I think the model is derived.

(I have since found out the item was sculpted by Lionel Leslie).