From an Antique Land E-Book

Anne MacLeod

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 513

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This book looks at visual images as an alternative and undervalued source of evidence for ideas about the Scottish Gaidhealtachd in the period 1700 - 1880. Illustrated with 100 plates, it brings together many little known and previously unrelated images. Addressing the textual bias inherent in Scottish historical studies, the book examines a broad range of maps, plans, paintings, drawings, sketches and printed images, arguing that the concept of antiquity was the single most powerful influence driving the visual representation of the Highlands and Islands from 1700 to 1880, and indeed beyond. Successive chapters look at archaeological, ethnological and geological motives for visualising the Highlands, and at the bias in favour of antiquity which resulted from the spread of these intellectual influences into the fine arts. The book concludes that the shadow of time which hallmarked visual representations of the region resulted in a preservationist mentality which has had powerful repercussions for approaches to Highland issues down to the present day. The book will appeal to historians, art historians, cultural geographers, and the general reader interested in Highland history and culture.

Leseprobe

From an Antique Land

This eBook edition published in 2013 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Anne MacLeod 2012

First published in 2012 by John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

The moral right of Anne MacLeod to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-906566-53-1 eBook ISBN: 978-1-907909-07-8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

For my parents

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

‘A Task Altogether Impracticable’: Facing the Classical Ideal

CHAPTER 2

‘Plain Middle Class Men’: Towards a New Art Market

CHAPTER 3

‘Rude Stones’: Prehistoric and Medieval Antiquities

CHAPTER 4

‘The Graceful Garb’: Depictions of Highland Dress

CHAPTER 5

‘Curiosity and Barbarism’: The Highlander at Work

CHAPTER 6

‘The Pastimes of a Mountain Race’: Domestic Life and Leisure

CHAPTER 7

‘So Torn and Convulsed’: Confronting the Highland Landscape

CHAPTER 8

‘A Wonderful Orderliness’: Time and the Imagination

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

BLACK AND WHITE

1  Attributed to Edward Lhuyd, ‘On a Hill Above the Upper End of Loch Kreigness in Argileshire’, c.1699–1700.

2  ‘Castle Troddan and Castle Tellve’, after a drawing by Alexander Gordon, in Alexander Gordon, Itinerarium Septentrionale: or a Journey thro’ Most of the Counties of Scotland, and those in the North of England (London, 1726), pl. 65.

3  ‘Danish Edifices’, after a drawing by Moses Griffith, in Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772 (2 vols, Chester, 1774–6), I, pl. 41.

4  ‘Dun Dornadilla’, after a drawing by Charles Cordiner, in Charles Cordiner, Antiquities and Scenery of the North of Scotland, in a Series of Letters to Thomas Pennant (London, 1780), pl. 19.

5  James Skene, ‘Pictish Towers in Glenelg’, 1804, from an album of drawings of Highland scenes.

6  ‘Druidical Stone near Strather, Barvas, Isle of Lewis’, after a drawing by William Daniell, in William Daniell, A Voyage Round Great Britain (8 vols, London, 1814–26), IV, pl. facing 64.

7  James Miller, North West View of the Nunnery, Pen and Wash and Watercolour, 1775.

8  ‘At Keils, in Knapdale, Argyllshire’, after a drawing by Alexander Gibb, in John Stuart, The Sculptured Stones of Scotland (2 vols, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, 1856–67), II, pl. 32.

9  James Skene, ‘Iona’, n.d., from an album of drawings of Highland scenes.

10 ‘View from Port Sliganach’, after a drawing by Henry Davenport Graham, in Henry Davenport Graham, Antiquities of Iona (London, 1850), pl. 50.

11 ‘South West View of Kilcairn Castle in Lock Aw’, after a drawing by Paul Sandby, in Paul Sandby, The Virtuosi’s Museum (London, 1778), pl. 50.

12 ‘View of Brochel Castle in Rasay’, after a drawing by John MacCulloch, in John MacCulloch, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (3 vols, London and Edinburgh, 1819), III, pl. 2.

13 ‘Inverlochy Castle’, after a drawing by James Melville, in Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels, ed. G. N. Wright (2 vols, London, 1836–8).

14 ‘Fingal and Fillan discovering Cuthullin’, after a drawing by Richard Corbould, in James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian (2 vols, Glasgow, Cameron and Murdoch, 1797), I, pl. facing 60.

15 ‘Figures in Highland Dress’, after a drawing by an unknown artist, in Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London (2 vols, London, 1754), II, pl. facing 60.

16 Illustration to the poem ‘Fingal’, after a drawing by David Allan, in James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (2 vols, Perth, Morison, 1795), I, pl. facing 56.

17 Diploma certificate for the Highland Society of London, engraved by Luke Clennell after a drawing by Benjamin West, 1805.

18 ‘Portrait of a Highland Chief’, after a drawing by Charles Edward Stuart, in John Sobieski Stolberg and Charles Edward Stuart, The Costume of the Clans (Edinburgh, 1845), pl. 8.

19 ‘Highland Carts’, after a drawing by an unknown artist, in Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London (2 vols, London, 1754), I, pl. facing 86.

20 ‘Old Times/New Times’, after a drawing by A. MacInnes, in Sir Francis MacKenzie, Hints for the Use of Highland Tenants and Cottagers (Inverness, 1838), frontispiece.

21 Attributed to Paul Sandby, ‘Women with a Cart’, from a sketchbook of drawings made in the Highlands, c.1747.

22 Diagram of the Cas-Chròm, from John Home’s ‘Observations on the Farm of Oldernay’, Survey of Assynt, 1774.

23 ‘Cas-Chròm’, after a drawing by an unknown artist, in James MacDonald, General View of the Agriculture of the Hebrides, or Western Isles of Scotland, with Observations on the Means of their Improvement (Edinburgh, 1811), frontispiece.

24 ‘Rose’, after a drawing by R. R. McIan, in R. R. McIan and James Logan, The Clans of the Scottish Highlands (2 vols, London, 1845).

25 ‘Loch Ranza Bay, and the Manner of Taking the Basking Shark’, after a drawing by Moses Griffith, in Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772 (2 vols, Chester, 1774–6), I, pl. 13.

26 Title cartouche from ‘The Lewis, or North Part of the Long Island’, in Murdoch Mackenzie, Orcades: or a Geographic and Hydrographic Survey of the Orkney and Lewis Islands, in Eight Maps (London, 1750).

27 Title cartouche from John Ainslie, Scotland Drawn and Engrav’d from a Series of Angles and Astronomical Observations (Edinburgh and London, 1789).

28 J. M. W. Turner, Inveraray, Loch Fyne, Watercolour on paper, c.1803.

29 James Skene, ‘Castle Lachlan, Argyleshire, 6 Aug 1834’, from an album of drawings of Highland scenes.

30 ‘Tarbert Castle’, after a drawing by Edmund J. Crawford, in John Parker Lawson, Scotland Delineated in a Series of Views (2 vols, London, 1854), II, pl. facing 308.

31 John Claude Nattes, ‘Distillery of Callander’, from a series of sketches of Scottish scenes, 1799.

32 Frontispiece illustration after a drawing by John Francis Campbell, in John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands (4 vols, Edinburgh, 1860–2), IV.

33 ‘Highland Township’, after a drawing by an unknown artist, in Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London (2 vols, London, 1754), I, pl. facing 120.

34 Joseph Farington, ‘The Structure of a Moss House’, from sketches accompanying an account of a tour in Scotland, 1792.

35 David Allan, The Scottish Highland Family, 1795.

36 William Simson, Interior of a Cottage at Killin, Watercolour on paper, 1833.

37 ‘Washing Customs in the Highlands’, after a drawing by an unknown artist, in Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London (2 vols, London, 1754), I, pl. facing 52.

38 Neil MacLean, after a drawing by William Craig, c. 1784.

39 William Wyld, Angus MacKay, Watercolour, 1852.

40 Egron Lundgren, The Gillies’ Ball, Watercolour and Bodycolour, 1859.

41 ‘The Game of Shinty’, in the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 31 January 1835.

42 ‘Shinnie, by the Club of True Highlanders, on Blackheath’, after a drawing by an unknown artist, in the Illustrated London News, 7, 1845, 32.

43 J. and F. Tallis, ‘Scotland’, drawn and engraved by J. Rapkin, in R. Montgomery Martin, ed., Illustrated Atlas and Modern History of the World (London, 1851).

44 Elisabeth Caroline Fussell, ‘P. Comrie, Gille Callum, Sword Dance, St Fillan’s Games, Sept 4 1839’, among sketches taken in Scotland during a tour in the summer of 1839.

45 ‘Throwing the Hammer, Laggan Highland Games’, after a drawing by an unknown artist, in the Illustrated London News, 11, 1847, 157.

46 ‘Archibald Mackintosh and Alexander Mackintosh’, after a drawing by Kenneth MacLeay, in Kenneth MacLeay, The Highlanders of Scotland (London, 1872), pl. 22.

47 John Henry Bastide and John Dumaresq, The Roads between Inversnait, Ruthven of Badenock, Kiliwhiman and Fort William, in ye Highlands of North Brittain, 1718.

48 ‘View from Beinn na Caillich in Skye’, after a drawing by Charles Bell, in Robert Jameson, A Mineralogy of the Scottish Isles (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1800), II, pl. facing 94.

49 ‘Cascade of Loth-Beg, Sutherland’, after a drawing by Charles Cordiner, in Charles Cordiner, Remarkable Ruins, and Romantic Prospects of North Britain, with Ancient Monuments, and Singular Subjects of Natural History (2 vols, London, 1788–95), I.

50 ‘Loch Tummel, Perthshire, Looking East’, after a drawing by John Fleming, in John M. Leighton, Swan’s Views of the Lakes of Scotland (2 vols, Glasgow, 1834–6), I, pl. facing 83.

51 ‘Curved Gneiss in Lewis’, after a drawing by John MacCulloch, in John MacCulloch, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (3 vols, London and Edinburgh, 1819), III, pl. 7.

52 ‘Ben Arthur, Scotland’, after a drawing by J. M. W. Turner, from Etchings and Engravings for the ‘Liber Studiorum’, 1819.

53 ‘Ben-na-Muich-Duidh, from the Glen of Lui-Beg’, after a drawing by George Fennell Robson, in George Fennell Robson, Scenery of the Grampian Mountains (London, 1814), pl. 34.

54 ‘Staffa’, after a drawing by J. M. W. Turner, in Sir Walter Scott, The Complete Poetical Works (12 vols, Edinburgh, 1833–4), X, title vignette.

55 ‘Loch Coriskin’, after a drawing by J. M. W. Turner, in Sir Walter Scott, The Complete Poetical Works (12 vols, Edinburgh, 1833–4), X, frontispiece.

56 ‘Glencoe’, after a drawing by J. M. W. Turner, in Sir Walter Scott, The Prose Works (28 vols, Edinburgh, 1834–6), XXV, frontispiece.

57 ‘Illustration of Mountain Forms’, after a drawing by John Ruskin, in The Works of John Ruskin, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols, London, 1903–12), VI, 182.

58 John Ruskin, Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas, Pen and Ink with Wash, 1853.

59 ‘Glencoe’, after a drawing by Horatio McCulloch, in John Parker Lawson, Scotland Delineated in a Series of Views, with Historical, Antiquarian, and Descriptive Letterpress (2 vols, London, 1854), II, pl. facing 307.

60 John Francis Campbell, ‘Clibreg &c., 1 October 1869’, sketch from a manuscript journal.

61 ‘Probable Source of the Gold: Rock Sculpture on a Large Scale on the West Coast of Sutherland and Cromarty, Sketched from the Sea in 1848’, after a drawing by John Francis Campbell, in ‘Something from “the Diggins” in Sutherland’, published paper, 1869.

62 ‘Glen Sannox’, after a drawing by John A. Houston, in John Parker Lawson, Scotland Delineated in a Series of Views, with Historical, Antiquarian, and Descriptive Letterpress (2 vols, London, 1854), II, pl. facing 294.

COLOUR

1  Paul Sandby, View near Loch Rannoch, Watercolour on paper, 1749.

2  W. A. Nesfield, Circle of Stones at Tormore, Isle of Arran, Watercolour on paper, 1828.

3  Horatio McCulloch, Lochaline Castle, Oil on canvas, 53.3 × 76.2, 1856.

4  Richard Waitt, Kenneth Sutherland, Third Lord Duffus, Oil on canvas, 203.2 × 140.6, c.1712.

5  Charles Jervas, John Campbell, Third Earl of Breadalbane (as a Child in Highland Costume), Oil on canvas, 152.4 × 96, 1708.

6  Pompeo Batoni, Colonel William Gordon of Fyvie, Oil on canvas, 258.2 × 186.1, 1766.

7  Sir Benjamin West, Alexander III of Scotland Saved from the Fury of a Stag by the Intrepidity of Colin Fitzgerald, Oil on canvas, 366 × 521, 1786.

8  ‘MacIvor’, after a drawing by R. R. McIan, in R. R. McIan and James Logan, The Clans of the Scottish Highlands (2 vols, London, 1845).

9  Sir William Allan, Sir Walter Scott in his Study at Abbotsford, Oil on board, 81.3 × 63.5, 1831.

10 Sir Edwin Landseer, A Scene in the Grampians – The Drovers’ Departure, Oil on canvas, 125.8 × 191.2, c.1835.

11 Horatio McCulloch, The Cuillins from Ord, Oil on canvas, 71.1 × 121. 9, c.1854.

12 ‘Carrying Home Peat’, after a drawing by R. R. McIan, in R. R. McIan and James Logan, Picturesque Gatherings of the Scottish Highlanders at Home, on the Heath, the River, and the Loch (London, 1848).

13 James Barret, View of the Village of Stornoway, Oil on canvas, 84 × 117.5, 1798.

14 Joshua Cristall, The Shore of Loch Fyne at Inveraray: Sunset, Watercolour on paper, c.1818.

15 ‘Strath-Naver’, after a drawing by William Daniell, in William Daniell, A Voyage Round Great Britain (8 vols, London, 1814–26), IV, pl. facing 90.

16 Sir Edwin Landseer, An Illicit Whisky Still in the Highlands, Oil on panel, 80 × 100.4, 1826–9.

17 ‘Drovers’, after a drawing by R. R. McIan, in R. R. McIan and James Logan, Picturesque Gatherings of the Scottish Highlanders at Home, on the Heath, the River, and the Loch (London, 1848).

18 John Pettie, Tussle for the Keg, Oil on canvas, 56.2 × 45, 1868.

19 Sir Edwin Landseer, Flood in the Highlands, Oil on canvas, 198.5 × 311.2, c.1845–60.

20 John Milne Donald, The Drove Road, Oil on canvas, 24.1 × 31.7, 1857.

21 John Phillip, The Highland Home, Oil on panel, 44.7 × 60.8, 1845.

22 Katharine Jane Ellice, ‘Interior of a Highland Cottage’, n.d.

23 ‘Girls Washing’, after a drawing by R. R. McIan, in R. R. McIan and James Logan, Picturesque Gatherings of the Scottish Highlanders at Home, on the Heath, the River, and the Loch (London, 1848).

24 Richard Waitt, The Piper to the Laird of Grant, Oil on canvas, 213 × 154, 1714.

25 ‘Grant’, after a drawing by R. R. McIan, in R. R. McIan and James Logan, The Clans of the Scottish Highlands (2 vols, London, 1845).

26 John Francis Campbell, ‘Games, Islay, Dec 29 1842’, from an album of drawings by John Francis Campbell.

27 Peter Tillemans, The Battle of Glenshiel, 1719. Figures probably include Lord George Murray, Rob Roy MacGregor and General Joseph Wightman. Oil on canvas, 118 × 164.5, 1719.

28 Area around Stac Pollaidh, in William Roy, A Very Large and Highly Finished Coloured Military Survey of the Kingdom of Scotland, Exclusive of the Islands, 1747–55.

29 Sir John Clerk of Eldin, View Looking Upstream from Dail-an-eas Bridge, Pen, Watercolour and Wash, 1785.

30 James Skene, ‘The Parallel Roads of Glen Roy, Inverness-shire’, n.d., from an album of Highland scenes.

31 Detail from J. A. Knipe, A Geological Map of Scotland (London, 1859).

32 ‘Gribune Head in Mull’, after a drawing by William Daniell, in William Daniell, A Voyage Round Great Britain (8 vols, London, 1814–26), III, pl. facing 60.

33 George Fennell Robson, Loch Coruisk and the Cuchullin Mountains, Watercolour and Bodycolour, c.1828.

34 Sir Edwin Landseer, Study of Rocks and a Rivulet, Oil on board, 20.2 × 25.2, c.1832.

35 John William Inchbold, Cuillin Ridge, Skye, from Sligachan, Oil on canvas, 51 × 69, 1856.

36 William Dyce, The Highland Ferryman, Oil on canvas, 51.1 × 61.1, 1857.

37 Horatio McCulloch, Loch Maree, Oil on canvas, 111.4 × 183.2, 1865.

38 John Knox, The Head of Glen Sannox, Arran, Oil on Canvas, 89.5 × 125, n.d.

List of Abbreviations

AAGM

Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum

AM

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

BL

British Library, London

ECL

Edinburgh Central Library

EUL

Edinburgh University Library

FWAF

Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, London

GM

Glasgow Museums

GUL

Glasgow University Library

MG

McManus Galleries, Dundee

MMAG

McLean Museum and Art Gallery, Greenock

NAS

National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh

NGS

National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

NLS

National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

NMS

National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh

NPG

National Portrait Gallery, London

NTS

National Trust for Scotland

RC

Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

SNPG

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

SSAM

Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum

V & A

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

YCBA

Yale Center for British Art, USA

AJ

The Art Journal

ILN

The Illustrated London News

f.

folio

n.d.

no date

n.p.

no page

n.s.

new series

pl.

plate

Acknowledgements

My greatest debt of gratitude is to Dr Martin MacGregor, who supervised the doctoral thesis from which this book emerged and who has been a constant source of encouragement and useful guidance. Thanks are also due to Dr MacGregor and Professor Colin Kidd for backing my decision to publish and to Mairi Sutherland and colleagues at Birlinn for taking on the project and for their help and advice along the way. In particular, I would acknowledge Jacqueline Young for her efficient copy-editing.

I am indebted to the staff of all the libraries, museums and galleries in which I carried out my research, too numerous to mention individually here. Permission to reproduce key images within this book is gratefully acknowledged in the captions. I would also like to thank Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik for permission to quote from family papers, and the Gaelic Society of Inverness for allowing access to material in the Society’s library.

The initial research was supported by a three-year grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2002 to 2005. I have also benefited from the support of the Inverness Field Club, the Gaelic Society of Inverness, the Hugh Barron Foundation and the Glasgow Highland Society. Publication would not have been possible without further funding from the Marc Fitch Fund, the Scotland Inheritance Fund, the Scouloudi Foundation (in association with the Institute of Historical Research) and the Strathmartine Trust, and I would like to thank all of these bodies for their generous assistance.

Last but not least, I must acknowledge the practical help and inspiration of family, friends and colleagues and particularly my parents over what must have seemed a very extended student career. After writing for so long about visual constructions of the Highlands and Islands it was strange at first to find myself back living and working among the real thing. I hope this book has benefited in places from a renewed or deeper acquaintance with some of the iconic scenes discussed within it. It remains to be said, of course, that any errors, omissions or misrepresentations remain my own responsibility.

Introduction

In 1749, a young military draughtsman completed a watercolour drawing of his colleagues surveying near Loch Rannoch in western Perthshire (Colour plate 1). The artist, Paul Sandby (1731–1809), was working on an epic new survey of the Scottish mainland, a project which challenged the skills of artists and mapmakers to their core. The Rannoch view provides a rare visual snapshot of the methods and equipment used by mid-eighteenth century surveyors in the field. It is also a topographical record of an identifiable spot on the north side of the River Tummel. However, what makes it most interesting as a historical source is what Sandby chose to leave out. Rachel Hewitt, author of a recent biography of the Ordnance Survey, describes the drawing as ‘a brilliant piece of visual propaganda’, advertising ‘the indomitable force of the King’s army’. She rests her case on the fact that Sandby ignored the most prominent landscape feature visible from his chosen spot: the mountain Schiehallion.1

Hewitt’s reading, while rhetorically plausible, is problematic. Although she claims that ‘a background featuring Schiehallion would have dwarfed the surveyors, making their task to map the whole Scottish mainland appear comically absurd’, the surveyors are in fact significantly dwarfed by the amount of landscape Sandby does show in the drawing. Furthermore, I first came across the Hewitt passage while crossing the Grampians on a north-bound train on a grey day in mid-September. Visibility was limited and the higher country blotted out by hanging cloud. In this context, it struck me that there might be many reasons why Sandby failed to include Schiehallion in his drawing of 1749. Perhaps, on the day he captured his sketch, he simply couldn’t see the mountain, or not enough of it to flesh out an accurate portrait. The space in the background of the drawing is blank, without the worked sky which could have been added had he wished to suggest the mountain simply wasn’t there. Perhaps he intended to add it in later. Or perhaps, in an age less persuaded by the aesthetics of high, barren mountains than ours, he viewed the most obvious compositional framework for his view through different spectacles. In any case, his primary subject was the surveying party. Had he been painting for pleasure or patronage in 1749, he was highly unlikely to have found himself sketching from nature on the banks of a river in the Scottish Highlands. This fact, and others, introduce the problems of interpretation inherent in the theme of this book.

It is well known that images of the Highlands and Islands dominate popular concepts of Scottishness. Castles and clans, tartan, bagpipes, whisky, bens and glens and mountain torrents, stags at bay, heather and hairy cattle: all have a well-established place in the visual canon. This is old news. What is less well understood is the process through which such stereotypes were forged and sustained. Although it may not be possible to trace a definitive point when it first occurred to somebody to sketch the summit of Schiehallion, it is virtually impossible to study the visual depiction of the Highlands and Islands much before 1700 due to a simple sparsity of evidence. If artists and mapmakers were visiting the region in any numbers prior to this date, they left precious few records of their impressions. This raises the question, why not? And if not, what happened during the course of the next 150 years to make the Scottish Highlands one of the most illustrated subjects in the British Isles?

The traditional explanations rest on literary influences, particularly the Ossian controversy2 and the popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances. Political factors are also highlighted: as the threat of lawlessness receded after the failure of the last Jacobite uprising in 1746, artists and travellers were more likely to travel to the north and west and to record what they saw. Later, the more sustained relationship which developed between the Hanoverian monarchy and the Highlands following Queen Victoria’s lease of Balmoral in 1848 is cited as a pattern which her subjects were anxious to follow. Social and economic issues may also have come into play: the industrial revolution drove people from smoky cities at the same time as transport improvements allowed them to reach the distant north, particularly after the spread of the railways.3 All of these factors help to explain why large numbers of relative outsiders found themselves venturing beyond the Highland line and presuming to interpret what they found in visual form. None of them, however, fully account for what such image-makers chose to draw, sometimes in isolation, but frequently over and over again.

The idea of a Highland line is often somewhat arbitrary, fluctuating according to geographical, cultural and linguistic criteria.4 In the period studied, the traveller’s sense of crossing a boundary when entering the geographical Highlands was very pronounced, and a wealth of definitions of the precise distinction between the two zones could be presented. Often, linguistic and cultural factors were brought in to support the more visual sensation of passing through the mountains.5 Travellers who reached the very far north had the additional problem of accommodating Caithness and the Northern Isles within a simple north–south divide. In 1805, Robert Forsyth was very precise on this score, distinguishing Caithness, the districts adjoining the Moray Firth, and part of Ross-shire as Lowland territory.6 In the map which accompanied David Stewart of Garth’s Sketches of the Highlanders (1822), on the other hand, Caithness was coloured as part of the adjoining Highland zone.7 Despite the problem of Caithness and the more easterly parts of Sutherland, Ross and Inverness-shire, Lizars’ map can be taken as a convenient index to what was perceived to be the limits of the Highland zone during our period, and most of the visual material considered falls roughly within its geographical bounds.

The study of mentalities or cultural perceptions is a form of history which has gained ground in recent years, and it has to some extent entailed the study of a range of non-traditional types of evidence. These include novels, stage plays, poetry, songs, travel accounts and newspaper columns: all self-consciously literary forms from which an authorial stance or point of view can be extracted. Evidence from such sources has also, however, been blended with material from the more conventional quarrying grounds of the historian: administrative archives, government reports, private correspondence, and contemporary essays and treatises. As this implies, ‘official’ records are often equally infiltrated with the cultural prejudices of their age. Traditionally, as Charles Withers points out, such bias or exaggeration might have been viewed as mere ‘chaff’ which had to be discarded in order to get at ‘the factual grain of Highland history’.8 But, as Peter Womack concurs, the ‘quantities of colourful nonsense’ which invade the sources are themselves the product of a historical process worth studying in its own right.9

Previous studies of perceptions have tended to focus on the period from 1745, although, more recently, the image of Gaelic society portrayed by early modern writers has also been documented. Taken together, this body of research presents two principal models within which attitudes towards the Gàidhealtachd can be understood. The first, developed in relation to the post-Culloden period, presents a picture in which universal hostility and contempt gave way under the influence of romanticism to transformed perceptions of both landscape and people.10 The second interpretative model does not discount evidence for rehabilitation in the later eighteenth century but emphasises the survival of a considerable degree of ambivalence from an earlier period. Cowan, Kidd and Mason all explore the complex legacy of the early modern period with this in view, highlighting a split in attitude which coupled idealisation of ancient Gaelic institutions with a considerable degree of hostility towards contemporary Gaeldom.11 Several studies of the post-Culloden period follow a similar argument, showing that contempt for the Highlander could comfortably coexist with more romantic sentiments. As in the early modern era, romanticism tended to settle around ideas of ancientness and the survival of tradition. There was also a new ingredient in the emergence of a taste for wild landscape, which brought with it its own contradictions. The celebration of emptiness often meant an instinctive rejection of the region’s native inhabitants as legitimate occupants of this landscape; moreover, the contemporary fashion for improvement often flourished uneasily alongside a romantic rejection of modernity and change.12

An important feature of this period was the belief that the Gaelic world belonged to a different era. The primitivist philosophy of prominent Enlightenment figures built on the kind of admiration for Spartan virtues expressed by earlier historians and chroniclers. In 1751, Adam Smith began a series of lectures in Glasgow which gave influential expression to the idea that societies develop in a series of progressive stages, passing from hunting to pastoral to agricultural and finally to commercial economies. According to this analysis, Highland difference could be explained by the fact that the region belonged to an earlier stage of society than its Lowland neighbour. ‘To the urbane philosophe of the late eighteenth century,’ writes Withers, ‘the Highlander was a contemporary ancestor, the Highlands the Scottish past on the doorstep.’13 Out of this sprang two conflicting inferences: first, that everything Highland was necessarily ancient and therefore worthy of preservation per se; and second, that the region was not inherently or irredeemably backward and could be helped into the commercial stage of society by intensive improvement. In theory, this involved a split between perceptions of contemporary Highlanders and the glorification of their past. In practice, the loyalty to tradition evinced by Highland Society members and antiquarians was able to proceed unchecked alongside schemes designed to lift the Gael out of his seemingly endemic poverty and squalor.14

Although the idea for this book was first inspired by a short section on the fine arts in Robert Clyde’s From Rebel to Hero (1995), historians working in this field have by and large failed to quarry the potential of visual images in any depth. Outside Scottish history, there has been a shift towards a more sustained and sensitive engagement with visual sources among a small group of historians, mostly working in the field of cultural history. In 1995, a new series of monographs was launched under the title ‘Picturing History’, with series editors Peter Burke, Sander L. Gilman, Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter. Volumes in the series, covering a wide range of periods and topics, are linked by their use of pictures as direct evidence about the past, and by a critical approach which construes images ‘as active tools of negotiation, parody and resistance – as spaces in which history is made and enacted, as well as recorded’.15 This stance is highly significant, as it places visual material at the centre of a new kind of historical research, prioritising such issues as power and identity, constructions of race, gender and ‘otherness’, and perceptions of taboos like death, illness and punishment.

Such studies tend to be less concerned than traditional art history with hierarchies of merit, provenance, patronage and an artistic canon. Rather, historians in the field of visual history look at how images interacted and concealed the tacit cultural assumptions of their makers. Initial research for this project swiftly revealed that the wealth of source material for studying the visual depiction of the Highlands and Islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was vast. Beyond the fine arts, military maps, estate plans, travel journals, works on antiquities, amateur sketches, sets of collectable prints, literary illustrations, illustrated periodicals and scientific publications were all being churned out at a faster rate than had ever previously been possible. Some of this material has of course already been studied in considerable depth, but usually in isolation from images in different genres. For example, paintings are looked at by specialists in art history, literary images by literary historians, antiquarian images by historians of archaeology and geological images by historians of science. Although projects which aim at breadth attract their own pitfalls, the rewards of seeing a correlation between images produced in widely differing contexts are frequent and surprising.

As research for this book progressed, attention was inevitably diverted to and from promising source types. For instance, images of improved landscapes such as the large-scale eighteenth century estate surveys and mansion portraits were an early avenue of exploration. Although these images interact to some extent with other genres, particularly sets of picturesque views, the sheer volume of material which falls into this category has placed a detailed examination of estate plans and their visualisation of an ‘improved’ landscape beyond the scope of this book.16 Despite this, an interesting aspect of land surveying which deserves more attention is the level of draughtsmanship which went into the making of the final plans. This frequently spilled over into decorative cartouches, vignettes and marginalia which can provide illuminating links with other types of visual material, and are themselves a valuable resource for studying cultural perceptions.17

A book which looks at the visual representation of the Highlands as far as 1880 might also be expected to take in what was by then an emerging but established medium: photography. The first photographers tended to follow on from the subject matter and approach of earlier artists and illustrators, and the interaction between the different media would make a fascinating study in its own right. However, as any decision to extend in breadth means some sacrifice in depth, the tempting topic of photography has also been left to one side. Unknown to me, a scholarly study of photographers in the Western Isles, now published, was already in progress while I was carrying out the research for this book.18 It would be interesting to see its conclusions measured in the context of the mainland Highlands, and indeed the rest of Scotland, where many of the photographers discussed by Padget also practised their art.

The publication of Padget’s work on the Western Isles comes on the heels of an upsurge of academic interest in the visual depiction of the Highlands. Of particular note is ‘Window to the West: Towards a Redefinition of the Visual within Gaelic Scotland’ – a five-year research project based at the University of Dundee which culminated in a major exhibition in the winter of 2010. In 2003, the art historian John Morrison also published a definitive monograph on painting and Scottish identity, which includes a substantial discussion of Highland works.19 During the course of my own research, a series of exhibitions brought artwork from a wide range of collections to Edinburgh, focusing consecutively on Sir Walter Scott, the island of Iona, Queen Victoria at Balmoral and Sir Edwin Landseer in the Highlands.20 While all of this was extremely convenient for research purposes, the fact that it was happening independently of my project seemed to suggest that studying the visual depiction of the Highlands had come of age.

Despite reading extensively among the literature on visual historical methods, I have arrived at the conclusion that there is no magic formula for analysing an image which differs markedly from the approaches historians take to texts. Both, as Peter Burke points out, raise ‘problems of context, function, rhetoric, recollection (whether soon or long after the event), second-hand witnessing and so on’.21 Moreover, although history is often caricatured as a quest for ‘facts’, this does not necessarily entail the suspension of all deconstructive faculties. In defence of history, Richard J. Evans contends that ‘the language of historical documents is never transparent, and historians have long been aware that they cannot simply gaze through it to the historical reality behind’.22 Likewise, Cowan and Finlay suggest that historians ‘have for long been happily deconstructing material, all too conscious that what is not stated in a document may be just as crucial as what actually appears’.23 Visual documents are no different to texts in this respect: as Rachel Hewitt noted in the Sandby drawing of Kinlochrannoch, what is left out may be the key to its meaning. Interpreting such absences in the image are problematic, but perhaps no more so than when dealing with texts. The important thing is what statisticians would refer to as representative sampling.

In the course of such sampling, it emerges that a great many things which can be demonstrably proved from other sources are conspicuously absent from the visual record between 1700 and 1880. Most of these things can be grouped under the common theme of ‘change’. They include the impact of agricultural improvement on the small tenantry and the creation of the crofting landscape, widening access to education and literacy, migration and resettlement, and the evangelical movement within the Presbyterian churches. Visitors to the Highlands and Islands commented on all these things, but few of them chose to record them visually. When artists turned to the portrayal of Highland religion in the late Victorian period, it was to mystical ideas of the Druids and the early Celtic church24 rather than the vast evangelical gatherings which had impressed visitors like William Laidlaw and William Howitt in the 1830s.25 Likewise, illustrated journalism dealing with the land question in the Highlands and Islands would not appear until after the violent conflicts of the 1880s, and even then it was often tempered with picturesque and romanticised images of island scenery.26 Then as now, artists often exerted an absolutist influence over what was perceived to be authentic and indigenous. Inevitably, they dug deep into the past – or diverted attention from the turbulent present as much as possible – to find it.

CHAPTER 1

‘A Task Altogether Impracticable’

Facing the Classical Ideal

If asked to define the purpose of visual images, two broad, not always mutually exclusive, functions spring to mind: to document, describe or convey information; and to embellish, as aesthetic objects. Across our period, when images portraying the Highlands and Islands first appeared in significant numbers, a tension can be traced between these functions. The Highlands and Islands gradually became an acceptable and desirable subject for visual representation at a time when the universal, classical ideal of traditional art practice was beginning to yield to a more particularised and local aesthetic. In part, this shift was facilitated by the growing currency and power of documentary images. The significance of such cultural contexts for the visual representation of the Highlands is the main theme of this chapter.

The classical ideal in art impinged on the visual depiction of the Highlands in two ways. In the first place, it dominated the training and outlook of professional artists in such a way as to restrict the representation of the local or particular, so that they were unlikely to look northwards, or even to their own immediate setting, in search of inspiration for painting. Secondly, it also governed an important class of documentary imagery during the early part of our period: the antiquarian drawing or engraving. These influences were not unrelated, as well-known antiquaries, such as Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (1676–1755), were often active collectors of Old Master paintings, and enthusiastic patrons of the fine arts. Rome was the centre around which notions of cultural achievement gathered: its ruins and buildings the tangible evidence of a once universal power; its paintings, sculpture, and artistic legacy the envy of all ‘civilised’ nations. Prior to the establishment of art academies on home soil, aspiring Scottish artists made their way to Italy to learn at the feet of the masters. All the great names in the Scottish tradition could have been found in Rome at some point during the early part of our period: William Aikman (1682–1731), Allan Ramsay (1713–84), Gavin Hamilton (1723–98) and Alexander Runciman (1736–85), to name but a few examples.1

The first official art institution to open in Scotland in 1729 was named the Academy of St Luke after the famous Accademia di San Luca in Rome. Although the academy is thought not to have lasted more than two or three years, it marked the beginnings of formal art education in Scotland.2 To a degree, the academy’s Roman aspirations were offset by the fact that one of the six professional artists to sign its charter was James Norie (1684–1757), the founder of a firm of decorative painters responsible for some of the earliest paintings of the Highland landscape.3 If we can take this as evidence of a rising interest in native subjects among patrons and painters during this period, it is significant that it coincided with efforts to establish a system of art education on home soil. Such as they were, however, even recognisably Scottish scenes continued to be viewed, and portrayed, through classically influenced spectacles. In 1731, when Norie sent his two sons to London to take up an apprenticeship, it was to the workshop of George Lambert, a specialist in classical landscapes.4

In 1753, a second attempt was made to open a formal school of art and design in Scotland, this time situated in Glasgow. The Foulis Academy was founded by brothers Robert (1707–1776) and Andrew (1712–1775) Foulis, who also ran a publishing and bookselling business at the university. The new academy was endowed with funds by two local patrons, John Glassford of Dougalston (1715–1783) and Archibald Ingram (1704–1770). Some of the money was subsequently used by Robert Foulis to purchase paintings, drawings, prints and other teaching materials from continental Europe. The continental influence was maintained in his choice of drawing masters, imported from France and Italy. Teaching methods were based on the copying of original paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture, and history painting (the depiction of scenes from classical texts) was prioritised in the curriculum.5 The institution nonetheless catered for the applied arts, teaching such skills as landscape painting, the principles of architecture, and engraving techniques. In a notice published in the Glasgow Journalin August 1755, it was suggested that such accomplishments might prove useful to young gentlemen intending to follow a variety of careers, including the army, navy, and manufacturing industries.6

The most important and enduring of Scotland’s art institutions was the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh, established in 1760. This took its name from the Board of Trustees for Improving Fisheries and Manufactures in Scotland. Although the original aim of the institution was to encourage manufactures by teaching design to apprentice craftsmen, the board always appointed a fine artist as master.7 Successive appointees included Alexander Runciman, who spent time in Rome during the late 1760s,8 and David Allan (1744–1796), a former Foulis pupil, who had also studied in Rome under the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton.9 As Lindsay Errington describes, no firm distinction existed at this period between a course of instruction designed to equip students for the manufacturing industries, or for a career as a professional painter. Because of the scarcity of other training opportunities in Edinburgh, many Trustees’ students were in fact prospective painters, which inevitably affected the ethos of the school. Teaching methods were in any case traditional. From 1798, the academy began to accumulate a collection of plaster casts of antique Greek and Roman sculpture, from which students were expected to begin the study of life drawing. The idea of beginning with sculpture in preference to live models was to inculcate a sense of beautiful or ideal forms, which after all was what painters were expected to aspire to in their art.10

During the later eighteenth century, the most influential voice calling for the preservation of the universal ideal in art was that of Sir Joshua Reynolds, inaugural president of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London. The teaching side of the Academy opened in 1769, with students recruited from across England and from Ireland. It would appear that the Scottish contingent remained relatively small, due to the existence of separate institutions in Glasgow and Edinburgh.11 Reynold’s Discourses on Art – lectures delivered to the students and members of the academy at the annual prize giving – have been described as ‘tantamount to a statement of policy for the young institution’,12 and a perusal of their contents can shed further light on the prevailing character of art education during this period. The idea of ‘improving’ nature by creating a composite portrait of its most general principles comes to the fore throughout the lectures, and is explicitly set down in Reynold’s third discourse, delivered on 14 December 1770. According to Reynolds, the painter must study the blemishes or imperfections of natural forms in order to arrive at a true sense of beauty:

This long laborious comparison should be the first study of the painter, who aims at the greatest style. By this means, he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original, and what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object.13

Although Reynolds placed landscape lower down the hierarchy of genres than history painting, this principle was expected to apply to the study of landscape as well as to the human figure. Simply producing a faithful representation of a given spot, in the manner of the Dutch School, was not, in Reynold’s eyes, fulfilling the elevated purpose of art.14 ‘The painter’, he had stipulated in an earlier discourse, ‘must divest himself of all prejudices in favour of his age or country; he must disregard all local and temporary ornaments, and look only on those general habits which are every where and always the same’.15

In such a climate, there would seem to have been little opportunity for professional painters to consider the representation of Highland, or even identifiably Scottish, subjects as a viable goal for art. Outside the field of landscape painting, there were, however, two notable exceptions during the later eighteenth century. The first of these was Alexander Runciman’s decorative scheme for the great hall at Penicuik House, inspired by the recently published PoemsofOssian.16 The second was David Allan’s series of representations of a Highland dance at Blair Atholl in Perthshire.17 Grier Gordon draws attention to the size of Allan’s largest Highland dance scene,18 painted on canvas, as evidence that it was conceived on a scale more usually reserved for history paintings in the ‘grand style’. He argues that this portrait of particular manners may allude to the post-Ossian characterisation of the Highlands as a Scottish Arcadia, and that its living traditions were consequently as much a subject for high art as a scene from Homer or Virgil.19 These purportedly national scenes in fact fitted into the deeply entrenched classical culture of the period. The Poems of Ossian, for all their veneer of Gaelic otherworldliness, were nurtured in an intellectual climate which looked to familiar models of antiquity. While at Aberdeen, James Macpherson came under the influence of such men as Thomas Blackwell and William Duncan, both classical scholars of considerable repute. Blackwell, the author of An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), perceived a natural connection between the freedom of unsophisticated societies like early Greece and the kind of spontaneous creativity associated with the poet Homer. Duncan, who became Macpherson’s tutor in 1754, betrayed a similar sympathy for the virtues of primitive society in his preface to a translation of Caesar’s Commentaries, published in 1753. Stafford suggests that Macpherson turned this teaching inwards to the culture and society of his native Highlands, deemed backward and uncivilised by the modern world, but also the guardian of hidden strengths.20 To some extent, therefore, the Poems of Ossian can be seen bridging the gap between the universal and the local, suggesting that ancient traditions preserved in Gaelic culture were analogous to the state of all primitive societies.

In describing the objectives of the true landscape painter, Reynolds had stated that ‘he applies himself to the imagination, not to the curiosity, and works not for the Virtuoso or the Naturalist, but for the common observer of life and nature’.21 This introduces another tradition of visual imagery, which was to prove of profound significance for the depiction of the Highlands and Islands. In referring to the ‘virtuoso’, Reynolds invoked the tradition of travel and collecting among cultured gentlemen, often inaugurated by the Grand Tour, which completed a young man’s education during this period. Iain Gordon Brown has described the Grand Tour phenomenon with reference to one Scottish baronial family – the Clerks of Penicuik – whose experience he describes as an ‘epitome’ of its legacy in Scotland. On one level, collecting was focused on the acquisition of luxury goods such as paintings, books, silver, furnishings and fabrics. On the other, however, it also took in less valuable (and sometimes macabre) relics, such as a sprig of laurel plucked from Virgil’s tomb, or a ‘piece of an old Roman’s skin’, purportedly filched from a body in the catacombs of Naples. More serious antiquarian study was also fostered by first-hand encounters with the ruins of ancient Rome, sometimes prompting the creation of a visual record in the form of field sketches.22

Although the Clerks of Penicuik could count aspiring professional artists among their relatives,23 basic instruction in drawing was also seen as an important element of polite education from the late seventeenth century. This had especial application to the Grand Tour. In 1693, John Locke had written that he considered drawing ‘a thing very useful to a gentleman on several occasions, but especially if he travel, as that which helps a man often to express, in a few lines well put together, what a whole sheet of paper in writing would not be able to represent and make intelligible’.24 The skill of drawing might also be applied to the depiction of portable artefacts brought home. As cabinets of travel curiosities were built up, they were frequently organised like a private museum, with the objects classified and listed in catalogues. These catalogues were sometimes illustrated.25 This type of imagery had a very different purpose to the selective, idealising principles of fine art. Its intention was the creation of a faithful, documentary record of objects and monuments which could, if required, be made to stand in for the original.

The importance of images to travellers, antiquaries and natural scientists cannot be divorced from the rise of empiricism during the later seventeenth century. Locke, already cited above, is generally associated with the emergence of a culture in which the eye and the eyewitness were privileged above aural or verbal testimony. Starting in seventeenth-century Europe, Judith Adler has charted a shift in the purpose of travel that paved the way for the notion of sightseeing. Prior to this, she argues,

the aristocratic traveller . . . went abroad for discourse rather than for picturesque views or scenes. The art of travel he was urged to cultivate was in large measure one of discoursing with the living and the dead – learning foreign tongues, obtaining access to foreign courts, and conversing gracefully with eminent men, assimilating classical texts appropriate to particular sites, and, not least, speaking eloquently upon his return.26

From the early 1600s, however, ‘the eye found favour as affording a more detached, less compromising form of contact than the ear’.27 In 1642, for instance, James Howell described the eye as ‘a clear christall casement’, through which ‘wee discerne the various works of Art and Nature, and in one instant comprehend half the whole universe’.28

As this suggests, faith in the authenticity of sight was based on the idea that the eye presented a more unmediated, and thus less biased, picture of the world than the ear. Simply by recording what he saw, the traveller believed he could create a mirror image of an actual sight or scene. The problem with this approach was that visual experience required ‘translation’ into verbal form if it was to be communicated to others in the usual written way. Initially, this was attempted through the adoption of a simple, unornamented style which minimised rhetoric and excessive narrative.29 Gradually, however, the role of the image as a means of conveying precise information became more widely recognised. Utilitarian uses for the image remained fairly specialised in extent until the end of the seventeenth century, with the exception of cartography and illustrations in anatomical works and technical manuals.30 Gentlemanly antiquarianism, such as that practised by the Clerks of Penicuik, was nevertheless one of the first fields to follow suit. William Camden’s Britannia – a county-by-county description of the British Isles, first published in 1586 – can be seen as a summary of changing attitudes towards the image in microcosm. Compared with later editions, the original work was, as Piggott points out, an unprepossessing entity, being a ‘dumpy little quarto in Latin, with no maps and a woodcut of a medieval inscription as its only illustration’.31 Gibson’s editions of 1695 and 1722 progressively expanded the visual content of the work, with engraved plates of British and Roman coins, further inscriptions, some county maps, and illustrations of Stonehenge and other field monuments.32 By this time, prominent antiquaries were beginning to speak out openly in favour of the image. In 1717, William Stukeley recorded, in the minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London, his belief that ‘without drawing or designing the study of Antiquities or any other science is lame and imperfect’.33 The precise nature of its contribution was articulated in greater detail by the antiquary and naturalist William Borlase (1696–1772) who, in a letter of 1749, wrote:

The materials, style, measurement and appurtenances of monuments are things not to be new moulded by, or made to comply with every fanciful conjecture, but remaining always the same, will be impartial authorities to appeal to, invariable rules to judge of and decide the customs, rites and principles as well as monuments of the ancients; and therefore it is much to be lamented that all curious travellers and writers in antiquity did not draw, as well as travel and write, it being in my opinion next to an impossibility to convey an adequate idea of the simplest monument by words and numerical figures, or indeed to find out the justness and extravagance of a conjecture without seeing what the monument really is.34

In this analysis, the image takes on the burdensome role of the eyewitness: a direct, unmediated, on-the-spot record untrammelled by the interpretative mechanisms of words. More than this, it could even be seen as an adequate substitute for the original object, such that ‘the justness and extravagance of a conjecture’ might be measured by a remote audience using the objective witness of the visual record.

The potential of this documentary style of imagery for the visual depiction of the Highlands was initially limited by two factors: the absence of a precedent for travel outside the established Grand Tour circuit, and the inbuilt classical bias of antiquarian culture. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, most antiquaries saw early British history as significant only so far as it was Roman history, sometimes ascribing native monuments and artefacts to the genius of the former empire. This naturally inhibited the study of Anglo-Saxon and Viking monuments as well as those attributed to the ‘aboriginal’ inhabitants of the British Isles: the ancient Britons. Such attitudes often connected the physical appearance of artefacts and monuments to the behaviour of their creators. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, for instance, considered the monuments of the Danes and Saxons as crude and ugly as their reputed conduct, and thus unworthy of serious study.35

Perceptions of the ancient Britons, including the original inhabitants of northern Scotland, involved similar sentiments, and the conquest of Britain during the first century BC was widely construed as less of a humiliation than a blessing. As Jane Stevenson has described, the study of ancient Rome often drew strength from the way in which the lessons of antiquity were believed to bear application to contemporary politics.36 Analogies were drawn between the potential power of a united Britain and that of the once-great Roman Empire. ‘Since the invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar,’ wrote Clerk of Penicuik in 1730, ‘it was the constant endeavour of all the greatest princes in this island to have all the people in it united under one and the same government, and our neighbours of Europe were affrayed of nothing so much.’37 The difficulty with this construct was that the geographical areas which had proved most problematic for Roman conquest seemed no more easily absorbed by eighteenth-century Britain. The resistance of the ancient Scots, or Caledonii, made legendary by Tacitus, was a thorny point: despite clear evidence of Roman activity north of the Tweed, the permanence of military conquest remained under question. The significance of Hadrian’s Wall as a political frontier was particularly problematic, as unionist Scots like Clerk of Penicuik, and his contemporary Robert Sibbald (1641–1722), were anxious to prove that Scotland had participated in the civilising benefits of Roman rule. Sibbald’s solution to the problem was to emphasise the difference between Highland and Lowland Scotland, moving the frontier of Roman government as far north as Perth, and determinedly reading any trace of a camp or fortress as evidence for a settled population.38 ‘The thrust of Sibbald’s work,’ writes Stevenson, was ‘to confine the barbarian Caledonii to the Highlands, and to move the frontier of settled and Romanised Britain up to the very edge of the Highland line.’39 In the context of union politics and debates concerning the ethnic ancestry of the Lowland Scot, this had its own significance. For our purposes, however, the point to note is that resistance to Rome implicitly placed the Highlander beyond the pale for any serious antiquarian attention. As on the maps of the ancient world, the lands north of the Tay could still be perceived as ultima thule – the point ‘where the world and all created things come to an end’.40 This had implications for antiquarian images. Piggott describes one instance of a Highland targe being mistaken for and listed in a private museum catalogue as a Roman shield.41 In Gibson’s first edition of Camden, the visual content in the Scottish sections, such as it was, also betrayed a Roman bias. This volume contained a draught of ‘the Roman wall in Scotland’, by which was meant Graham’s Dyke, purportedly copied from a sketch in the papers of Timothy Pont, the late-sixteenth century mapmaker; to this were added some further inscriptions from the Roman wall, contributed by Sir Robert Sibbald, and an illustration of ‘Arthur’s Oven’, a Roman temple located near Larbert in Stirlingshire.42

Despite its very real influence on antiquarian perceptions, it is important to note that the privileging of Rome was not an entirely one-sided story. Even in Clerk’s disapprobation of the tribes who had resisted Rome’s ‘humanity’, there lay an undercurrent of ambivalence. In the same passage, he also betrayed a covert admiration for their martial vigour and patriotic fervour,43 mirroring the attitudes of earlier writers who castigated the Celts for barbarity and backwardness while lauding their supposed hardiness and valour. For such as Clerk, the benefits of civilisation ultimately outweighed a heroic stand for freedom, but others were not so persuaded. Alexander Gordon, who published an illustrated account of Roman remains in Scotland in 1726, argued that ‘from the Tenor of the whole Roman History in Britain, it cannot be shewn, that the Scots and Picts ever suffered the least Part of their Country to lie under Subjection, any considerable Time, without re-possessing themselves thereof, and taking a just Revenge upon their Enemies and Invaders’.44 While conceding such victories as Mons Graupius, Gordon laid emphasis upon their temporary nature.45 The key to Scottish freedom, in his view, was its distinctive geography, which prevented the Romans from progressing northwards from the Tay, and complicated their ability to build a permanent foothold from temporary gains:

It is indeed no new Thing to hear People speak, with Contempt, of the barren Soil and bleak Mountains of Scotland; but if their Situation is such, that these very Mountains seem by Nature to have been placed as so many Bulwarks, for the better defending their Independancy and Freedom, and preserving them from the griping Tallons of the grand Plunderers of the World, in that Case, the Advantages accruing from them, are much more eligible than the precarious Possession of a terrestrial Paradise without Liberty.46

The association of freedom and liberty with the wilder parts of Britain was not a new idea. Gibson’s translation of Camden’s Britannia, published in 1695, had drawn parallels between the retreat of the ancient Britons to Wales and Cornwall during the Saxon invasions and that of their Pictish counterparts during the Roman wars: ‘Rather than be brought under slavery (the very worst of evils) they shifted to these northern parts, frozen by excess of cold, horrible in its rough and craggy places, and imbogued by the washing of the Sea, and the fens in it; where they were defended not so much by their weapons, as by the sharpness of the air and weather.’47 In the political climate of the early eighteenth century, the idea of a liberty and distinctiveness preserved by geography had particular applications to perceptions of the predominantly Jacobite Highlands. This, as we will see, spilled over into the visual records created by military draughtsmen working in the region during this period. Within the world of scientific travel, however, the idea of a culture which had maintained its independence from the rest of Britain since Roman times was beginning to hold, for some, a peculiar fascination.