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

John Morrison

This pioneering account of painting in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scotland is a compelling history of the most vibrant period in the nation's art history. It also casts a new and revealing light on the nature and evolution of Scottish identity. John Morrison integrates art and history in ways that reveal as much about the paintings as they do about the wider issues of the time. Painting in Scotland, he shows, was a barometer of the tensions between the country's idea of itself as a discrete entity and its position within the United Kingdom.

Political meanings are revealed not only in depictions of great moments in history but in the whole range of Scottish painting from images of everyday life to romantic landscapes of crags and lochs. We also see how artists could in the same painting at once display their pride in the British nation and at the same time celebrate Scotland's difference. In John Morrison's exposition icons such as Robert Bruce and Glencoe and the runic carvings of the Picts take on new meaning as symbols of a nationalism bound to unionism. In addition to the work of artists such as Sir David Wilkie, Horatio McCulloch, Sir George Harvey, George Paul Chalmers and Sir James Guthrie, less well-known paintings such as G. P. Chalmers End of Harvestand W. D. McKay's Winter Morning are explored.

About the Author

John Morrison is a lecturer in the history of art at the University of Aberdeen.

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