Perhaps my favourite aspect of art history is standing in front of a piece of art imaging all the wildly different people who have stood looking at it before me. But standing is maybe the wrong word, since at the beginning of this week I was kneeling on the floor of the St Andrews Museum Collections Centre gazing at a lithograph of a polar bear. If I want to imagine someone who is my complete opposite then I only need to think about Fridtjof Nansen, a past rector of St Andrews. An arctic explorer, humanitarian, and amateur artist (but powerful patron) his recommendation to the students of St Andrews in his rectoral address entitled "Adventure" was to burn their boats behind them. This was the system he used to cross Greenland in his successful expedition of 1888-1889: the group went from east to west so that home was always ahead to prevent the desire to return to their boats. Despite the rousing sentiment and notable success he made of himself with this philosophy, Nansen and I will unfortunately be using different methods to achieve our goals. I do not think a good adage for researchers is to burn their metaphorical boats, since returning to past readings that we previously thought unnecessary once we realise their absolute necessity is far too common. I think preserving the boats as specifically as possible is probably the better recommendation. Any boats I have burnt were unintentional casualties and I rue the day I accidentally closed Google, losing around ten JSTOR articles due to my shoddy filing system of keeping tabs open until my computer literally overheats.

But I digress. I was shown around the Wardlaw Museum and Collections Centre with my advisor, surprising myself with my excitement at seeing the Nansen works on display. My research surrounds the works that our past rector had created and bequeathed to the university collection. Though his time as an arctic explorer and representative to the League of Nations have been well-documented, his links to the Lysaker Circle, a Norwegian art group, have been less examined. This group were a significant voice in the independence movement from Sweden, and Nansen was similarly a key figure in this process. I hope that my research on the St Andrews collection can shed light on him as both the political nationalist and the artistic individual. Certainly, the self-portraits felt revealing of both: his confident pen strokes of his face in profile provides the audience a view of him as a statesman, not the rugged explorer that initially rose to fame. As an art history student I cannot verbalise the world of difference seeing an artwork in person makes to the viewing experience. Instead of seeing these works as a collection of pixels on a screen, I could see the indents of where he put pen to paper to immortalise his own image. Comprising of two landscapes and two portraits across these two buildings it was surprising how expansive the ideas for my eventual outputs became based on what felt like little material. The most exciting/daunting aspect about my first week researching has been how much I've found and how little time and words are afforded to me by the 6 weeks and 3000 word essay. I feel like I can safely say that all Laidlaw scholars are facing this dilemma.

Otherwise, my first week has consisted of about as much reading but more emailing than I expected. Luckily the emails have allowed me to be introduced to lovely people whose enthusiasm in helping me find a certain book or use a certain website has only increased my own excitement for the project. It turns out that my somewhat romanticised view of sitting alone amongst stacks of books in a quiet library tracing the influence of plein air painting on the Norwegian nationalist movement of the late 19th century (despite being a very pleasant Thursday afternoon) was not the full picture of researching. Instead, I have found that research is not an independent endeavour. Rather, my conversations with my advisor and other experts in the museum, library, and School of Art History have been by far the most inspiring moments of my first week. 

With one week down and only five to go, the list of questions that I've hastily scribbled down in my 'Nansen Notebook' has grown larger than I could have ever imagined. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, these will only increase in the coming weeks when I explore the primary resources that are Nansen's illustrated accounts of his expeditions and travel to Norway to visit his home, Polhøgda, which was decorated by various artists from the Lysaker Circle. Again, I'm sure that my fellow scholars are in the same boat  - but let's not be too quick to pull out the matches just yet.