The Fraud of the ‘Nordic Homer’: An Overview of Ossian Reception in the Visual Arts
by Blanca Carolin Hahn
With The Poems of Ossian, 1760-1763, James Macpherson published one of the most influential literary documentations of ancient Celtic culture. He claimed the collection of heroic poems and tales to be a translation of the ancient Gaelic poet Ossian. In a time of increased patriotism and interest in national folklore, the poems became an immediate success in Scotland. However, this alleged poet never existed, the so-called “ancient” poems were written by Macpherson himself, who was drawing on several traditional Gaelic sources to produce imaginative texts. Although the authenticity of The Poems of Ossian was occasionally questioned since its publication, the romantic imagery of Celtic Scotland inspired a plethora of writers, musicians and scholars and furthermore posed a significant influence in the visual arts of the following decades.
Alexander Runciman, The Blind Ossian Singing and Accompanying himself on the Harp (drawing for the Hall of Ossian at Penicuik), 1772, pen and brown ink on paper, 46.6 x 59.9 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
The first full-scale artistic response was The Hall of Ossian by the Scottish painter Alexander Runciman in 1772, a ceiling decoration of a large room at Penicuik House near Edinburgh. Runciman had just returned from a trip to Rome, where he was greatly influenced by Scottish artist Gavin Hamilton and his series of paintings illustrating Homer’s Iliad. Emulating the illustration of ancient heroic tales in a classical mode, but with the (supposed) ancient Gaelic subject, Runciman pioneered the interplay of Celtic and classical elements.
The Hall of Ossian had a great impact on artists all over Britain, including William Blake and Angelika Kauffmann, which made the Ossian poems one of the deciding catalysts of the Celtic Revival in British and Irish Art.
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810, oil on canvas, 110 x 172 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
In the early 1780s the Ossian poems began to receive a wider Continental European response. Danish painter Nicolai Abildgaard is considered a pioneer of this second phase of Ossian reception, which gave the image of Ossian Scandinavian and Germanic features and lead to his reputation as the ‘Nordic Homer’. Many of Abildgaard’s students assumed this direction, inter alia Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, two of the most defining figures of Romanticism.
While Runge illustrated the poems, Friedrich was celebrated for painting with the effect of the Ossian poems. One of his most well-known paintings, Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810, was mentioned especially frequently in this context. Friedrich’s Ossianic landscapes, which expressed the mythical and heroic elements of Macpherson’s publication, were praised and imitated widely and became a great influence on the romanticist notion of the ‘sublime’.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Dream of Ossian, 1803, oil on canvas, 348 x 275 cm, Musée Ingres, Montauban.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the poems of the ‘Nordic Homer’ lead to a third phase of reception in French history painting. Under the patronage of Napoleon Bonaparte, who regarded the poems as a military ideal of heroic virtues, many painters like Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson or François Gérard included the verse in their work.
The monumental image of The Dream of Ossian, 1803, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, that was to be put up above Napoleon’s bed in the Quirinale in Rome, marks the end of the wider European response to Ossian. However, the ideas and cultural impact still carried on throughout art history. The subject of the Ossian Dream introduced by Ingres even is considered by some scholars as a forerunner of Surrealism.
Even though the ‘Nordic Homer’ started out as nothing but a forgery by James Macpherson, it turned out to be more than just a strange Victorian phenomenon and greatly affected the visual arts across Europe. Thus, the Ossian Poems certainly remain one of the most successful and influential literary frauds in history.
Bibliography
Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Gaskill, Howard, ed. The Reception of Ossian in Europe. London: Continuum, 2004.
Macmillan, Duncan. Scottish Art 1460-1990. Edinburgh: Mainstream Pub., 1996.
Macpherson, James, and Howard Gaskill. The Poems of ossian and Related Works. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.