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The Golden Age of Scottish Painting, 1707-1843
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11474 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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10 / 1986 |
3,073 Words |
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Duncan Macmillan
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"Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another."
David Hume, who wrote those words, was one of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, the remarkable flowering of intellectual and imaginative life in Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The word 'science', as he uses it here to describe the vision of the Enlightenment of the unity of human knowledge, includes all branches of human understanding. Painting belonged at the center of these as a primary means of exploring the realm of experience. Faithful to Hume's vision, painters readily exchanged ideas with philosophers, poets, or scientists and, instead of seeking to claim any special field of sensibility for art, sought instead to maintain its place as part of the ordinary fabric of human experience.
It is this which gives painting in Scotland its special interest. David Hume and the portrait painter Allan Ramsay were close friends and exchanged ideas; so too did Robert Burns and the landscape painter Alexander Nasmyth. David Wilkie exchanged ideas as an equal with Charles Bell, the doctor who discovered the nature of the nervous system, as well as with Walter Scott. Nasmyth, besides being a painter, was a talented engineer, and this conjunction of interests can perhaps be focused into a single image, for when the world's first successful steamship sailed on Dalswinton Loch in Ayrshire in 1788, it was partly designed by him. Nasmyth and Robert Burns were together in the crew and the event was recorded in a drawing that he made. Only in the Renaissance and in seventeenth-century Holland was there such close interaction between painters and their contemporaries.
It is logical that painting should have played a prominent role in a culture preoccupied with the idea that the proper understanding of human nature might set the world to rights. In this pursuit the painters shared two main lines of approach with their contemporaries in other fields. The first was shared by the portrait painters and the philosophers. Raeburn and Ramsay painted according to the principles of empirical philosophy. As a result their painting is fresh, direct, and natural. There is no barrier either of time or of class between us and their sitters, and you can see the same faces in the streets of Edinburgh today.
The second approach was shared by genre and subject painters, like David Allan and Alexander Runciman, and the poets, but also with such pioneers of the study of human society as Adam Ferguson. Like the poets, the painters believed that by imitating the unspoilt primitive imagination as it seemed to be represented in oral traditions of poetry and music, they might discover the original principles that govern human nature. Landscape painting borrowed from both empirical philosophy and traditional imagination, which are fully united in the work of David Wilkie. Building on this dual heritage, Wilkie became one of the most inventive and influential, as well as one of the most popular artists of his time in Europe.
All this evolved gradually. The upheavals of the civil and religious wars of the seventeenth century disrupted life in Scotland so much that no continuous tradition of painting could be maintained. At the end of that century the demand for painting was being met by foreigners like Flemish artist
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