Art and Identity in Scotland: A Cultural History from the Jacobite Rising of 1745 to Walter Scott by Viccy Coltman (review)

I suspect it was Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (a BBC radio series and then a Penguin book, 2010), which popularized the idea that history can be informatively and immediately conveyed through the scrutiny of individual objects. MacGregor, an art historian by training, and at the time director of the British Museum, imbued his selected items with a certain reverential essentialism. The central cultural and social aspects of a given era were expressed through the physical manifestation of a given entity. Hence, “a hauntingly beautiful” Maya maize god statue from the eighth century A.D. synthesizes human and agrarian cycles; an intricate gilded model galleon, manufactured in Augsburg in 1585, becomes a synecdoche for the complexities of the Holy Roman Empire; and an early Victorian tea-set, made from earthenware and silver, is an object lesson in British social aspiration.

As fashionable as MacGregor’s analysis has become, one might observe this style of particularized investigation has been around in Scottish studies from at least the late twentieth century, even if one should also acknowledge that it has been almost exclusively concerned with Jacobite phenomena. This focus on Jacobitism can be easily explained, given the rich and vivid iconography of that particular political and cultural tradition, a consequence of necessary subterfuge, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, which resulted in cryptic portraits alongside other coded signs of allegiance. And then there was the startling transformative moment in the nineteenth century, when previously seditious Jacobite imagery and paraphernalia was suddenly embraced for the mainstream representation and celebration of the Scottish nation. Notable contributions to analysis of this type include Richard Sharpe’s The Engraved Record of the Jacobite Movement (1996), Robin Nicholson’s Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Making of a Myth: A Study of Portraiture (2002), Neil Guthrie’s The Material Culture of the Jacobites (2013), and Murray Pittock’s evocatively-titled Material Culture and Sedition, 1688–1760: Treacherous Objects, Secret Places (2013).

So, Viccy Coltman’s Art and Identity in Scotland: A Cultural History from the Jacobite Rising of 1745 to Walter Scott is to be welcomed as an attempt to expand object-based history beyond Jacobitism to take in a wider conspectus of Scottish experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her title is, perhaps, a trifle misleading, as her discussion is as much concerned with Scots outside their native land as inside it. The book is plausibly conceived and assembled in terms of its sections and chapters. Art and Identity in Scotland has an introduction which considers theories of identity, nationalism, Britishness and Scottishness. The opening part, entitled “Beyond Scotland,” has three chapters, the first of which examines Scottish experience in Europe, focusing on the portraits of Scotsman on the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. The second chapter of these three chapters considers Scots in London, with a central account of George Steuart’s architectural designs; and the third tackles the Scottish role in the British Empire, mainly through an examination of the letters of Claud Alexander, a Scottish colonial official and trader in Bengal in the 1770s and 80s, but also with an account of an Anglo-Indian watch chain or guard chain, woven disconcertingly from human hair.

In the book’s second part, the author considers art and identity in Scotland. Coltman begins this section with a chapter on Jacobite artefacts, entitled “’Daubed with Plaid and Crammed with Treason’: The Visual and Material Culture of Embodied Insurrection”; this is followed with an account of George IV’s transformative visit to Edinburgh in August 1822; and the final chapter examines Sir Walter Scott’s use of ekphrasis in his novels in conjunction with Romantic objects and illustration. The conclusion extends the account of Scott with observations on his posthumous reputation, and with a...