---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 4:33 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Albion]: Leask on Coltman, 'Art and Identity in Scotland: A Cultural History from the Jacobite Rising of 1745 to Walter Scott' To: <[email protected]> Cc: H-Net Staff <[email protected]>
Viccy Coltman. Art and Identity in Scotland: A Cultural History from the Jacobite Rising of 1745 to Walter Scott. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories Series. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2019. Illustrations. xviii + 302 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-41768-6. Reviewed by Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow) Published on H-Albion (July, 2020) Commissioned by Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth Viccy Coltman's book tackles the issue of Scottish national identity (prickly as a thistle) in visual and material culture, from Culloden to the death of Jacobitism's most celebrated elegist, Sir Walter Scott. Coltman, who is a professor of art history at the University of Edinburgh with a particular interest in portraiture, sets out to question an essentialist notion of a "Scottish School of painting" as a unified national tradition based on vaguely defined ethnic characteristics (p. 16). Underlining the role of Scots in establishing _British_ identity in the century after union (a by-now familiar argument), Coltman draws on a wide range of theoretical perspectives, while expressing reservations with some postmodernist theories of identity. For instance, Linda Colley's influential _Britons: Forging the Nation_ (1992) was a model for this kind of Scoto-British historiography, but Coltman is critical of Colley's overdependence on binary oppositions: "self-definition depends on antithesis, identity on counter-identity" (in other words, Protestant English, Scots, and Welsh "Britons" defining themselves against Catholic French or Spanish "others") (p. 6). Citing Dror Wahrman's thesis in _The Making of the Modern Self _(2004), Coltman offers a messier but more historically nuanced picture, accepting Wahrman's notions of gender and class but adding diverse national, occupational, and political attributes of identity. Approaching the question through visual culture, she claims, will "invest 'the old epistemology of identity' with a renewed analytic purchase that embraces different regimes of representation and alternative taxonomies" (p. 12). Most of the book is dedicated to the analysis of images and objects (lavishly illustrated, it contains thirty-three colored plates): but Coltman has also delved deep into the literary archives to draw on contemporary correspondence and travel accounts that provide a crucial commentary on the "silent witnesses" of images and objects. Part 1 is divided into three chapters addressing the artistic construction of Scottish identity in Europe, in London, and in colonial India. The first chapter, on portraits of aristocratic and gentlemanly Scots on the Grand Tour, opens with a discussion of Pompeo Batoni's marvelous 1766 portrait of the swaggering, be-kilted Col William Gordon, featured on the cover of Coltman's book (also a poster boy for the National Museum of Scotland's recent _Scotland Wild and Majestic _show). As well as the Batonis, there is some purposeful analysis of bodily pose and sartorial style in portraits of touring Scots like James Boswell, Dr. John Moore and the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Hope, and the Earl of Breadalbane. Mrs. Piozzi (Hester Lynch Piozzi) described Scottish Grand Tourists as a "national phalanx" always on the lookout for their fellow countrymen, but Coltman prefers to emphasize the tour's supplemental role in initiating young elite Scots into British, and indeed European, identities (p. 23). Chapter 2 turns to Scots in London, opening with analysis of Richard Newton's racialist satires "A Flight of Scotchmen" and "Progress of a Scotchman," a reminder that the "national phalanx" was also a protective gesture in the Scotophobic metropolis around the time of Bute's administration. Her fine-grained account of the Perthshire architect George Steuart's London career reveals the limits of national partisanship, as Steuart's commissions for his patron the Duke of Atholl aroused the rivalry of the Scottish brothers Robert and James Adams, "the Adelphi." Professional rivalry here outweighed the sort of Caledonian partisanship that threatened Newton. In perhaps the strongest chapter in her book, Coltman shows the important role played by London in the mid-eighteenth century's "discovery of Scotland," not only by English or Welsh traveler/artists like Thomas Pennant but also by native Scots like George and his brother Charles Steuart, who was commissioned in the 1760s to paint an astonishing series of waterfall views in the dining room at Blair Castle (p. 67). The chapter ends with a meticulously researched account of the rebranding of the duke's picturesque Dunkeld Hermitage as "Ossian's Hall" in the early 1780s, making it the leading attraction on the Highland "petit tour." Steuart's painting of the blind Gaelic bard parted at the tug of a pulley, opening upon a vertiginous mirror chamber of colored glass, reflecting the spectacular falls of the Black Lynn. Excavating Steuart's correspondence with the 4th Duke, Coltman also describes the creation of the custom-made, lyre-backed "Ossianic" furniture manufactured in London and shipped to the Highlands. The familiar story of Anglo-Scottish jealousy needs to be balanced by a "reciprocal traffic of cultural exchange" between London and Scotland, marked by the rising popularity of the Highland tour in these decades (p. 103). Chapter 3 travels east to colonial Bengal, focused on Johann Zoffany's portrait of "Claud and Boyd Alexander with an Indian Servant," painted in the early 1780s. Mining Alexander's correspondence, the chapter traces Claud's rise from a humble clerk in the East India Company's accountancy office to paymaster general. Claud's multiple identities in India overlap as a Scot, a Briton, a European, etc.: but the zenith of his fortune saw his return to Scotland in 1786 as a wealthy "Nabob," and his purchase of the Ayrshire estate of Ballochmyle from Sir John Whitefoord, an impoverished scion of Scotland's traditional gentry. In fact, Claud had purchased the estate in 1783, and Zoffany's portrait depicts him with his brother Boyd at the moment they received the letter from home confirming the Ayrshire purchase, framing the transformation of colonial loot into social capital back home. The chapter ends with a discussion of Claud's establishment of a cotton-spinning factory at Catrine in partnership with David Dale, an instance of a personal fortune amassed in the colonies being invested in local "improvement" (122-23). Coltman misses an interesting Robert Burns connection here, though, relating to the Ayrshire Bard's song "The Bonny Lass o' Ballochmyle," addressed to Claud's daughter Wilhelmina. Burns's amorous advances (and epistolary approaches) spurned by the Alexanders, he commented waspishly on the family's _arriviste_ status: "ye canna mak a silk-purse o' a sow's lug" (you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear). The second part of the book turns to some more familiar aspects of Scottish art and identity in the period. Chapter 4 addresses Jacobite material culture, necessarily drawing on the exhaustive scholarship of Murray Pittock and Neil Guthrie. Coltman focuses on a fascinating medley of Jacobite objects, including textile relics, engraved glasses, punch bowls, and jewelry, mainly held in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland. (In places the writing here succumbs to jargon: "an articulated bodyscape embodying the objectscape that is Jacobite material culture" [p. 145].) She refers to the Manchester provenance of a number of Jacobite mementos, with the suggestion that this would warrant further investigation. (The city was in fact a hub of English Jacobitism, where the "Manchester Regiment" was raised on November 29, 1745, under the command of Col Francis Townley. As English rebels, the Mancunians suffered particularly severe punishment after the collapse of the Rising, nearly all the officers and men being executed, and the three hundred or so men of the regiment transported to the colonies.) Chapter 5 offers an illuminating account of "the King's Jaunt," George IV's state visit to Edinburgh in 1822 staged-managed by Sir Walter Scott. Drawing on rich visual documentation by Alexander Carse, J. M. W. Turner, David Wilkie, and J. W. Eubank, Coltman seeks to position the royal visit in what Peter de Bolla calls "the domain of the scopic" (p. 179). There is also some great analysis of caricature by Charles Williams and George Cruikshank, who parodies Henry Raeburn's striking contemporary portraits of Highland chiefs, and the obese Hanoverian king's unfortunate experiment with the kilt, formerly a symbol of Jacobitism. The book's final two chapters turn to the architect of the royal visit himself, Sir Walter Scott, who had been painted a staggering fifty-two times by his death in 1832, making him the most widely portrayed figure of his age after the Duke of Wellington. Coltman also addresses the illustrations of Scott's hugely popular poems and novels, as a writer whose success was considered to depend in part on the intensely pictorial (or "picturesque") quality of his narrative style. Between 1805 and 1870, over three hundred artists exhibited more than one thousand "Scott-related works in portraiture, genre scenes, literary or historical subjects" (p. 223). She plausibly discovers in this huge body of work the origins of the idea of a "Scottish School of painting" disputed in her introduction, a "hoary canon" owing more to romantic aesthetics and Scott's fiction than to any transhistorical qualities of Scottish creativity (p. 203). Throughout the book Coltman is at her critical best in discussing portraiture, and she devotes the latter half of the chapter to physiognomy rather than topography, partly because Turner's illustrations of Scott's writings have been recently studied by Gillen D'Arcy Wood and Sebastian Mitchell. She convincingly demonstrates (contrary to Wood) Scott's keen sensibility to visual culture, manifest in the pains he took to orchestrate portraits of himself in the guise of a "Borders Bard" at home in his "pic-nic dwelling" of Abbotsford. She analyzes Sir William Allen's portrait of Scott in his study, surrounded by his "gabions" or antiquarian knick-knacks, pouring over Mary Queen of Scots' proclamation of her marriage to Darnley (p. 250). The book's brief conclusion addresses the genesis of the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, a Gothic extravaganza commemorating the "the wizard of the north," consecrating his native land as "Scott-land," the perfect emblem of Scottish "art and identity" (pp. 258-59). But this romantic image is, as the final pages underline, a treacherous indicator of the nation's cultural identity, even if it did buttress the myth of "a Scottish school of art." Coltman prefers to propose "a national identity which was superseded and enhanced in alternative geographical contexts ... the multiple, processual identities for Scots and Scotland that proliferated within representation between 1745 and 1832" (p. 262). Coltman's book is an illuminating and entertaining contribution to the study of Scottish visual culture, opening the ongoing debate about Scottish identity to cosmopolitan and colonial influences, and widening the range of critical perspectives brought to bear upon it. Citation: Nigel Leask. Review of Coltman, Viccy, _Art and Identity in Scotland: A Cultural History from the Jacobite Rising of 1745 to Walter Scott_. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. July, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54984 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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