Caribbean Witchcraft in Edinburgh: The Empress Josephine and 18th Century Scottish Popular Opinion
By Zachary Vincent
The international connections hinted at by the painting Josephine and the Fortune-Teller (1837, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Scotland) by Sir David Wilkie demonstrate the ways in which the collective imaginations of the people of Scotland were stimulated by events happening in France at the beginning of the 19th century. While shock, horror, and a strong sense of condemnation were common in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the decades of violence which it sparked, there were more responses than just those. Indeed, Wilkie’s own portrayal of the scene from the life of the Empress Josephine involving the predictions of a fortune teller that she would one day be queen gives away more a sense of astonishment and awe than moral disapproval of (near) contemporary French leaders of the time.
Figure 1. Courtesy of National Galleries Scotland
The clear distinction between figures on the periphery of Wilkie’s painting and those at the centre sets a tone of drama, indicating the possibility that the artist (and perhaps a larger portion of the public in Scotland) were distanced enough from the politically motivated attitudes surrounding wars and regimes of the time to see events unfolding across the channel as more ‘soap-opera’ and less existential. The caricatures Wilkie uses furthers this sense of drama, with a clearly identifiable greedy mother behind the bashful yet elegant Josephine telling an age-old story of power dynamics between parents and their children. That the fortune-teller depicted was said to have predicted not only Josephine’s ultimate rise to Queenship, but also her fall from power, only makes the matrilineal relationship at the centre of the composition all the more interesting. The depiction of black slaves on the periphery of the work serves to add features of ‘exotic interest’ for Scottish viewers (Josephine was from the slave-dependent island of Martinique in the Caribbean), while also foreshadowing the perceived dominance and power which Josephine would come to exercise over France.
The most dramatic figure of the entire composition is, of course, the fortune-teller herself. Clad in patterned textiles rendered with Wilkie’s usual attention to textural detail, the fortune-teller seems far from a comment on ideals about legitimate governance and empire. Her complex expression, practiced ahead of time by Wilkie in great detail, is dark and stormy, emphasized further by the dark shadows around her face. In her, Wilkie found a way to express the terrifying progression of time, sparing none yet changing all. While not always directly politically impacted, the people of Scotland at the time of painting would have been very aware of the ways in which their society was changing permanently, and the fortune-teller became an ideal vessel for both ‘mystic’ traditions and attachments to the past as well as fears about unavoidable change.
If viewers of the painting can identify with any depicted figures, it must certainly be with the young female figures to the side of the composition. Watching a dramatic, earth-shaking scene unfold, Wilkie allows viewers in any age to experience a taste of what it must have been like as a Scot in the early 19th century: very much connected to contemporary events, but not necessarily passing only negative moral judgements on them. Wilkie’s painting may allow art historians today to reexamine the attitudes of Georgian Scots towards the Emperor Napoleon and his family, particularly Josephine, adding nuance to an already complex system of exchange.
Or perhaps, in the same way that historians have long seen what they were searching for with regards to Scottish attitudes towards French leaders in Wilkie’s day, contemporary thinkers are also distorting unnecessarily the painting’s true original intent; after all, pure entertainment and fascination transcend chronological boundaries and will always find a ready audience in lovers of art and drama.
Bibliography:
“Josephine and the Fortune-teller.” National Galleries Scotland. 2020. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5579/josephine-and-fortune-teller-dated-1837.
“Sir David Wilkie.” National Galleries Scotland. 2020. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/sir-david-wilkie.