English Fantasies of Rugged Scotland: Who is the Real “Monarch of the Glen”?
by Kasia Middleton
Against a backdrop of grey-purple mountains, dramatic clouds, and hazy horizons, a stag proudly raises his chin. His coat is glossy, billowing in the wind around his neck. He stands in wild grass up to his knees, and his majestic antlers are drawn into contrast against the pale sky. His ears are pricked, but this is not an animal hunted. His gaze is proud and all-knowing. There is a sense that he stands at the summit of a mountain just like the ones behind him. Crowned with antlers, on his rocky throne, he observes his surroundings as a king surveys his dominion.
Figure 1: Sir Edwin Landseer, The Monarch of the Glen, c.1851. Oil on canvas, 163.8 x 168.9cm, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh. Photo courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland.
This is Sir Edwin Landseer’s biscuit tin image of Scotland, The Monarch of the Glen (1851) [Fig.1]. Currently, it hangs proudly against a regal red wall in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. This rugged portrayal of rural Scotland is a particular highlight for the many tourists who flood into the gallery each day. It is not hard to see why. The proud stag is to 19th century painting what Braveheart was to 90s film. He represents the classic image of Scotland: land of the free, home of the brave.
But where did the poster-boy of Scotland come from? Whose reality? Whose imagination? Whose patronage? Whose monarch really is this?
Throughout the Victorian period, Landseer was admired for his virtuosic paintings of animals and natural scenes. His artworks are fundamentally realistic and all-encompassing. He profoundly influenced famous French artists such as Bonheur and Délacroix. Despite his affinity for the gloomy Scottish scene, he was an Englishman, born in London in 1804. He first visited the Highlands in 1824.
His works show a deep admiration for these spectacular landscapes that still attract myriad tourists today. Before dismantling his representations of rural Scotland as the fantasies of a Victorian Londoner, I must acknowledge that he portrays these great sweeping scenes with respect and interest. But against what backdrop? Just as his great stag of 1851 is shown against a misty background of clouds and mountains, so Landseer’s entire œuvre is set against a complex cultural context.
Firstly, we should consider the Highland Clearances. Since around 1760, the steady eviction and emigration of low-class Highland tenants had paved the way for a replacement of the population of rural Scotland. The second phase, beginning in the early 19th century, bears obvious relevance to Landseer’s painting of the area in the same period. As residents were evicted and crammed into crofts to make room for emigrants from the Lowlands, their food supplies failing them, their professions collapsing, and their potatoes becoming diseased, Landseer took annual jaunts up to the Highlands to take his leisure painting.
Secondly, we should consider the 19th century interest in Romanticism and the Sublime. Edmund Burke’s seminal 1757 treatise on the latter, perhaps best defined as an enormity we cannot process, one which makes us feel small and insignificant, had a profound influence on the creative cultures of the 18th and 19th century. Romanticism, which began around the end of the 18th century and continued into the first half of the 19th, took great inspiration from the concept, and in many of the most famous works of art belonging to this movement, the sense of enormity and the effect this has on the individual is striking.
Figure 2: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818. Oil on canvas, 94.8 x 74.8 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Photo courtesy of Elke Walford.
Comparison between The Monarch of the Glen and Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) [Fig. 2], a particularly seminal work of Romanticist art, evidences the importance of Romanticist principles to Landseer over three decades later. Just as the Wanderer is the intermediary between his sea of fog and the Sublime mountain range that stretches beyond, so does the Monarch act as the individual in the experience of the Sublime. Thus, Scotland becomes a sensation for Landseer. Its status as a place is delegitimised, and its standing in the Victorian mindset as a feeling is solidified. The English imagination is free to impose anything it wishes upon this land, which is nothing but untamed, Sublime mountains. Contemporary obsession with the poems of Ossian, published in translation by James Macpherson in 1760 to 1763, added to this sense of Romanticism, with stories of a long-gone land of Nordic Homeric heroes, a dead culture to look back on wistfully, not one currently dying in overpopulated crofts.
Finally, to construct a complete image of the cultural context within which Landseer’s painting occurred, we should consider who he intended the work for. As a national commission, the painting was originally composed for the refreshment room of the House of Lords in London. Although it ended up in the hands of private collectors, the elite taste for Landseer did not diminish. He was a favourite of Queen Victoria herself, who along with her husband Albert, built a holiday home in Balmoral between 1848 and 1853.
Figure 3 Sir Edwin Landseer, Queen Victoria Sketching at Loch Laggan, 1847. Oil on panel, 34.1 x 49.5 cm, The Royal Collection. Photo courtesy of the Royal Collection.
The young royals adored the Highlands. This admiration is represented in paintings by Landseer, such as Queen Victoria Sketching at Loch Laggan (1847) [Fig. 3] and Death of the Royal Stag with the Queen Riding up to Congratulate His Royal Highness (1865-7) [Fig. 4]. The couple are shown as civilising English influences over the rugged land, implying it was previously untamed and uninhabited, which, as I have outlined above, simply was not true. Albert goes on gentlemanly, sporting hunts, and Victoria sketches, a hobbyist equivalent to Landseer, while her children admire a stag we are to presume has been shot on one of their father’s expeditions. It seems the only inhabitants of the Highlands are the odd deferential ghillie and noble animals like the Monarch of the Glen. The Victorian English imagination and footprint are therefore free to roam over the country as they wish, elite women and artists like the Queen and Landseer cataloguing what lives there, and gentlemen like Albert shooting these creatures down.
Figure 4: John Alfred Vinter after Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Balmoral in 1860 or Death of the Royal Stag with the Queen Riding up to Congratulate His Royal Highness, 1865-7. Lithograph, British Embassy, Dublin.
We feel a sense of uncomfortable familiarity with the eviction and death of previous inhabitants making way for new ones. Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen is indeed his kingly stag, but other paintings such as Death of the Royal Stag invite a young English shot to come along and make space for the true monarch to set up her easel and sketch.
The Monarch of the Glen cannot, when contextualised, feel like a patriotic Scottish painting. Instead, it is a representation of the Sublime which allows for the imposition of the English imagination. I would not, however, seek to correct the national pride contemporary Scots feel in this image. In fact, I would go so far as to encourage us to ignore Landseer’s intentions. Of course, to be aware of what an artist intended and critically evaluate how cultural context and mindset influenced a finished piece is integral to the study of art. But, to redefine artwork in the popular imagination is not to erase this awareness, rather it is to defy the problematic motivations we become aware of. I for one am glad that the shortbread tins will all show the stag with his defiantly raised chin this Christmas, not least because I imagine Landseer would most likely not be best pleased.
Bibliography:
Bendiner, Kenneth. “Philadelphia Museum of Art Sir Edwin Landseer.” The Burlington Magazine 124, no. 946 (1982): 57–55.
Devine, T. M. “Highland Migration to Lowland Scotland, 1760-1860.” The Scottish Historical Review 62, no. 174 (1983): 137–49.
Green, Richard. “Landseer. Edinburgh.” The Burlington Magazine 147, no. 1228 (2005): 503–4.
Haladyn, Julian Jason. “Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer’: Paradox of the Modern Subject.” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 41, no. 1 (2016): 47–61.
Ormond, Richard, and T. C. Smout. The Monarch of the Glen: Landseer in the Highlands. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2005.