My art's in the Highlands
John McEwen
SCOTTISH ART 1460-1990 by Duncan MacMillan
Mainstream Publishing, f35, pp.432
THE DICTIONARY OF SCOTTISH PAINTERS 1600-1960 by Paul Harris and Julian Halsby
Cannongate Publishing, £35, pp.236
The biographical blurb is commendably forthright; 'Duncan MacMillan has had an extremely distinguished career,' it says, before proceeding to fill in the details. Well, if he was extremely distinguished before as current Reader in Fine Art at Edinburgh University etc, it beggars de- scription what he will be now that he has published this history of Scottish art — the first of its kind for 40 years. It will surely gain deserved respect for its subject and comes at a good time, with the resurgence of market confidence in a whole range of Scottish artists, not least the super- fashionable colourists of the earlier part of this century.
What it does particularly well is to weave the story of Scotland's art in and out of the greater European story of which it is shown to be an integral part. This is not just a question of the virtually obligatory appren- ticeship served by Scottish artists in Rome up to the middle of the 19th century, and in Paris, New York or wherever latterly; but also of the important part played by Scots philosophers, poets, and supremely the great Sir Walter, in forming artistic opinion and providing Scottish subjects abroad as well as at home.
He begins in the reign of James III, not to deny that great things were made before then but because from that date art becom- es attributable to particular people in the modern way. The remains are scarce from the golden age of the Stuarts in the 16th century to the Enlightenment in the 18th, and nothing could bear grimmer testimony to the fact than that Part I of the book, which covers this period, only amounts to 70 pages — and these the years elsewhere of the High Renaissance and the full glory of the Baroque! The author is clearly embarrassed to admit that the 'wreck of Scotland's mediaeval past was comprehen- sive'; so one can forgive him omitting the name of Flodden from his account — that disastrous battle which brough renaissance Scotland literally to a dead halt — and his Panglossian reflections that if there were some unforgivable acts of iconoclasm (many of them by the English) then it was all for the progressive best in the end. Still, if this makes for a sticky start, there are some redeeming features; and he is right to emphasise them. A few things have sur- vived — the set of painted panels in the church of Foulis Easter near Dundee, for instance — and art did not totally cease. There were some good portraits painted in these years of civil strife, the romantic Bothwell's among them, and some pretty ceilings, notably at Cullen House, Morayshire.
Nevertheless one senses that it is with a sigh of relief that he embarks on Part II and the coming of Scotland's second gol- den age. This is the best section of the book, in which he explains the philosophy which lay behind the Enlightenment with admirable clarity. Perception, and espe- cially the sense of sight, were central to this debate; forging links between empirical philosophy and painting, between Ramsay and Hume, Raeburn and Thomas Reid (barely read now but of European import- ance in his time, the man who first prop- osed that the agent of perception was intuition). At last the Reformation, for all the work of those dour iconoclasts, finds redemption 'and a secular generation built on the social concern that from the start had been part of Protestant thought'; though not just Protestant thought by any means, one is impelled to add. Moral and aesthetic ideas were in turn seen to share a common field of experience; and accord- ingly a belief grew in the innate potential of Man and so inspired the search for simplicity — the interest in Homer, song, historical roots and lost paradises. Enter Burns, Scott and Wilkie, who was inspired by both. Throughout, MacMillan shows himself an admirably true Scot in his search for cultural unity — across disciplines, coun- tries and time itself. By way of illustration he reminds us that the surgeon Charles Bell (1774-1842), one of the pioneers of modern medicine, began his career as much in the milieu of art as of science. And Wilkie is persuasively argued to have anticipated Courbet, Raeburn, Manet and Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840), Seurat and the Italian futurist Boccioni. In the midst of this it is good to discover that Presbyterianism got a particularly good deal in Rome in the days of the grand tour, thanks to the presence there of the last Pretender, the Cardinal Duke of York.
Part IV, dealing with the 20th century, is less satisfactory — a breathless rush of names that makes it more of a dictionary than a history; and an inadequate diction- ary at that. The book must have gone to press before the James Pryde revival got under way; and not to mention Craigie Aitchison is unacceptable. It might also have been wiser to call it a history of Scottish painting, as the other visual arts hardly feature. Architecture MacMillan purposely avoids, but the neglect of sculp- ture and design, even to the point of not mentioning tartan, is a disappointment.
Paul Harris and Julian Halsby's diction- ary complements MacMillan's history, not least by making amends for some of its lapses. Here Pryde is given his due and Aitchison has a proper entry, including a just and accurate tribute from Helen Les- sore: 'Of all the artists now living and working in Britain, there is none with such a naturally Mediterranean soul.' This tight- er focus may have been helped by the wise decision to gain historical perspective by finishing in 1960. The authors are less snooty than MacMillan, not only letting in the estimable Archibald Thorburn but honouring him with the illustration of one of his most resplendent cock pheasants. There is plenty of illustrative meat in the sandwich and it is agreeably designed, with the pages further brightened here and there by an isolated signature or mono- gram of the relevant artist. The entries are short but entertain where they can. For example 'Hope, Jane 1766-1829' was de- scribed by a contemporary as 'a rather elegant woman possessing a good figure over which drapery might be thrown with good effect.' Mistakes and omissions will be rectified in later editions', declare the authors merrily. They obviously expect their dictionary to run and run, and so it should.
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