Painting the Nation: Identity and Nationalism in Scottish Painting, 1800-1920 (review)

In this lavishly illustrated and trenchantly argued book, John Morrison puts Scottish art at the very center of the broader current discussion on the nature of Scottish identity in the nineteenth century. Art certainly belongs there; Victorians expected their paintings not just to express their aspirations and values, but to represent national character, and the Royal Scottish Academy (chartered in 1838) was particularly concerned with developing recognizably Scottish art. Contending that Victorian art functioned as "a barometer of Scottish society as a whole" (2), Morrison examines many of the most prominent Scottish paintings of the period, finding in them compelling evidence that Scots enthusiastically embraced what he calls "unionist-nationalism"—an identity that blended "openly demonstrative patriotism [toward Scotland] to unquestioned, unconditional unionism" (227).

In the eighteenth century, believing that Great Britain would transcend the old warring entities of England and Scotland, Scots had tried to forge a new identity as "North Britons." The union was widely understood in England, however, as an incorporation rather than a partnership—there was no reciprocal movement toward reconceptualizing England as "South Britain." By 1800, says Morrison, Scots had largely abandoned their efforts to reconstruct themselves simply as Britons and, reclaiming their Scottish distinctiveness, had started to develop instead a concentric set of allegiances to Scotland and to Britain (19).

Morrison takes issue with critics who espouse "the fashionable view of the nineteenth century as a time of political inadequacy and cultural debasement" (13), a view that tends to dismiss Victorian Scottish culture as singularly inauthentic. Preferring to approach nineteenth-century Scottish art "in its own terms and within its social milieu" (2), Morrison refutes the proposition that nationalism necessarily involves separatism, and rejects any contradiction between loyalty to a mythologized Scottish past and loyalty to contemporary imperial Britain. Rather, he finds in the paintings he studies a valid and vibrant dual national identity, consistently, affirmatively, and sincerely asserted over 120 years.

The most popular visual markers of Scottishness were emblems of the Highlands—tartans, kilts, clan paraphernalia, rugged landscapes—which, as many have noted, had little historic connection to the Lowlands, where most Scots lived. "Highlandism is a construction," acknowledges Morrison. "It is not, however, a base deception practised upon an innocent Scottish populace" (224). Rather, in the hands of history and landscape painters, he proposes, it became an effective way to celebrate Scottish distinctiveness within a loyally British context. The title of Glencoe (1864), for example, Horatio McCulloch's most celebrated Highland landscape, invokes a historic Scottish trauma: in the infamous 1692 Massacre of Glencoe, the MacDonald clan were punished for their chief's tardiness in pledging allegiance to the new Hanoverian dynasty. However, the absence of any human figures and the inclusion of foregrounded stags, Morrison argues, also accept and naturalize the Highlands' new British role as a sporting playground. Even depictions of battles between England and Scotland, such as William Allan's paintings of the medieval Wars of Independence, eschew any hint of anti-Englishness and subscribe to the unionist-nationalist agenda. In Heroism and Humanity (1840), for example, Scottish hero Robert the Bruce embodies nobility and piety, qualities that allow "Scotland to emerge unconquered to take an honourable place alongside England, rather than subject to it" (120).

Paintings that focus on Scotland's contentious religious history also promote a dual identity, albeit from a different direction. After the 1707 Union, the Church of Scotland long remained Scotland's most powerful national institution, its General Assembly often functioned as a quasi-parliament, and its relatively democratic nature was thought to exemplify a distinctive Scottish egalitarianism. Yet the Kirk was a fervent proponent of the British Empire and its Christianizing mission, so that Scottish identity seen in religious terms, as in paintings by David Wilkie and others, had a unionist-nationalist dynamic.

The late-century Celtic Revival, which echoed some of the romance of Highlandism, had none of the separatist militancy of its Irish counterpart, but...