Gavin Hamilton and The Art of Feeling in the Scottish Enlightenment

By Kasia Middleton

“Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus.” Thus begins the whole of Western literature with a command to make something out of feeling. Homer’s Iliad has perennially captured the imagination in its complex web of human emotion, spun by a mysterious bard somewhere in Greece at some point in the 7th century BCE. The Enlightenment was one such era enthralled by the spell of the epic. We often think of the eighteenth-century fascination with antiquities that spurred on such phenomena as making the Grand Tour the marker of English  high society as a practice reserved for the bourgeois who spent their social seasons in London.

This notion, of course, is not misguided. Scotland, however, was also a huge centre for Classical passions. Following the 1707 Act of Union, which combined Scotland and England into Great Britain, the centralisation of Parliament down at Westminster drew aristocrats to London. At the forefront of the Scottish city in the eighteenth century, therefore, were the intellectuals and the writers, giving rise to what we now call the Scottish Enlightenment.

This period is often characterised by the so-called science of man, and the sociological and anthropological thinking which developed at the time. Whilst this is an important aspect of this epoch, it would not do to forget that intimately wrapped up with modern scientific development was a passion for all things antique. Latin and Greek were still languages key to the education of the elite in Scotland at the time. Roman archaeology in Scotland fascinated the gentleman scholar, and interest in the Antonine Wall gave rise to what has been termed “Agricolamania”, a trend named after the imperial Roman general who reached Scotland in the 1st century CE.

Both Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were published in the 1750s by the Foulis brothers in Glasgow, preceding Macpherson’s quasi-Homeric Ossian by only a decade. The Parthenon sculptures taken from Greece in the early nineteenth century are often termed (much to my eternal chagrin) the Elgin Marbles after the Scottish nobleman who undertook their removal. The National Monument of Scotland, which memorialises those who died during the Napoleonic Wars, is modelled after the very temple stripped of its décor. Edinburgh has earned itself the nickname “The Athens of the North”, played upon by artists to this day (such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, who named his garden in the Pentland Hills “Little Sparta” with his tongue firmly in cheek). In trying to understand the nature of mankind, the aristocrats participating in the Enlightenment, much like their Renaissance forebears, turned back to the ancient world to mine it for meaning.

What does it mean to be human? What is it to feel something? Can we quantify that? All questions which hung in the air around the artworks of Enlightenment Neoclassicist Gavin Hamilton (1723-1798), a Scottish painter who also spent much of his life in Rome involved in activities pertaining to the Grand Tour as well as early archaeological excavations. Having grown up and attended university in Glasgow, he moved to Rome to study under Masucci. At this time, in 1743, he wrote to his father: “My principal design in coming to Rome is to learn drawing wh.[sic.] is to be got by studying nature & correcting it by the Antique”. He returned for a brief interval to London in the 1750s, working as a portrait painter, but by 1756 he was in Rome for good. It was during this period, between c.1760 and 1775, that he worked on his epic cycle of pictures depicting episodes from Homer’s Iliad. They were: The Anger of Achilles for the Loss of Briseis, The Farewell of Hector and Andromache, Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus, Achilles Vents his Rage on Hector, Priam Redeems the Dead Body of Hector, and Andromache Bewailing the Death of Hector. Only two are extant, (The Farewell of Hector and Andromache [Fig. 1] and Achilles Lamenting the Dead Patroclus [Fig. 2]), the voracious appetite of the bourgeoisie for Classical subjects having long since absorbed the paintings into the private market, but the rest are known to us through reproductions in engraving by Cunego.

Gavin Hamilton, The Farewell of Hector and Andromache, c.1775. Oil on canvas, 315 x 398 cm. The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. Image courtesy of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow.

Gavin Hamilton, Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus, 1760-3. Oil on canvas, 227.3 x 391.2 cm. Scottish National Gallery. Image courtesy of Scottish National Gallery and Antonia Reeve.

It has long since been observed that eighteenth-century translations of the Iliad, notably Alexander Pope’s, inject great sentimentalism into the narrative that may not have been there in the original Greek. With the rise of sentimental marriages, anthropological and sociological theorisation, and increased reflection on the nature of man in a world which was increasingly quantifiable with the advent of modern science, people had never before had so much time to think about feelings. Antiquity provided a safe space through which artists and thinkers were able to explore this new proximity to emotion. Hamilton’s paintings above both represent two of the most highly charged emotional scenes from Western literature. In the first, Hector, prince of Troy, leaves his wife Andromache and their baby son Astyanax to fight in battle, despite Andromache’s protestations that she cannot lose him. In the second, Achilles mourns over the dead body of Patroclus, his beloved childhood companion who went to battle dressed in his armour, since he had refused to fight as a result of his anger in the opening of the Iliad (this derives from an episode in which Agamemnon stole Achilles’ trophy bride Briseis, whom he felt he had earned). So much is encapsulated just in these two episodes: masculinity, femininity, mortality, grief, honour, duty, love, and humanity. Interestingly, where gods might be included (for example, in the Iliad, Achilles’ divine mother appears as he laments over Patroclus’ body), Hamilton has chosen to leave them absent. His focus is on the purely human aspects of Homer, as one would expect from an artist operating in the increasingly scientific world cultivated by the Enlightenment. The only sign of any god is the woman praying to an unresponsive sky behind Hector and Andromache. In the second painting, we might think we see hints of a Christian god with the pale body of Patroclus recalling that of Christ in a traditional Pietà, but instead of a lamenting mother, we see a male companion wracked with guilt, armour that should have been his laid out on the floor. The traditional Christian layout is corrupted into an exploration of male emotion and guilt. This is before we even begin to touch on the idea that many versions of the myth show Achilles and Patroclus as lovers.

 Hamilton’s cycle of Homeric pictures points not only to his life as an artist in Rome obsessed with antiquity, but also to his birth and upbringing during the Scottish Enlightenment, which taught him about the richness of human creativity and feeling which he channelled into his own life’s work. The two paintings in this article examine tension between emotion and duty, love and life’s burdens, femininity and masculinity, and war and peace, all dualities which reared their heads during the Enlightenment in Europe. We might sneer at the Neoclassicist history painter’s inaccuracies which appealed to a contemporary image of an idealised antiquity, but we are forced to reconsider when confronted with Hamilton’s careful arrangement of Homeric events. While some painters of Homeric subjects at the time shamelessly mixed episodes of Ovid and Virgil into the mix with minimal cohesion, Hamilton’s cycle is squarely Iliadic, down to minute details. In Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus, the pale dead body of the latter and the pink, vital body of the former are mirrored in the tree in the background, with its broken lower bough and leafy branch above. Perhaps here Hamilton plays with the famous Homeric simile for human life: “The family of man is like the leaves of the trees. The wind scatters them on the ground, but the trees burst into bud and grow fresh leaves when the spring comes round.” Though they may feature armour that looks Roman, and columns of an order found much later and further West than Bronze Age Troy, these paintings’ true subject is human emotion.

The perennial fascination of the Trojan Cycle is that characters know what is coming, but continue on anyway. Achilles knows he will die at Troy, and yet he sails. Cassandra constantly tells the Trojans their city will fall, yet they protect Helen. Hector knows Achilles will kill him, but he fights. How can we explain this strange human phenomenon which is continuing on in the face of impermanence and loss? I would argue that Hamilton here is trying to answer these questions, and in doing so is not so divorced from the scientists who characterised the Scottish Enlightenment or from Homer himself. Where the 7th century BCE bard reached back to the Bronze Age, Hamilton reaches back to a non-descript antiquity, a canvas onto which he can paint some of the highest-pathos scenes of love and loss in the Western literary canon. The inaccuracies of the Neo-classicist history painter are thus not always symptomatic of a need to keep up with the contemporary art market. In the case of Hamilton, they show a careful awareness of ancient texts and the fundamentally human emotions they explore. As is recommended in Aristotle’s Poetics, taught at the University of Glasgow whilst Hamilton was a student, the painter has rendered Achilles (and his other epic characters, for that matter) in a way which shows he is clearly superhuman with a personality to match, but also reveals his fundamental goodness. Hamilton brings the Scottish Enlightenment to life from Rome, and tries to follow in the footsteps of Homer. Perhaps he heard his own command: paint, artist, what it means to feel.

Bibliography:

Cassidy, Brendan. “Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798): His Beginnings as an Artist Informed by an Unpublished Collection of Letters.” The British Art Journal 24, no. 1 (2023): 73–86.

Errington, Lindsay. “Gavin Hamilton’s Sentimental Iliad.” The Burlington Magazine 120, no. 898 (1978): 11–13.

“Gavin Hamilton: Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus.” National Galleries of Scotland. Accessed 18th February 2025. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5009

Glueck, Jessica. “‘My Soul’s Far Better Part’: Homer’s Hector As Man Of Feeling.” Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai, Philologia 68, no. 3 (2023): 13–34.

Hodgson, John, dir. The Story of Scottish Art: Episode 2: Enlightenment and Romanticism. 2015, BBC Two Scotland.

Homer. The Iliad. Translated by E.V. Rieu, revised and updated by Peter Jones and D.C.H. Rieu. Penguin Books, 2014.

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Kidd, Colin Craig. "The Scottish Enlightenment and the matter of Troy." Journal of the British Academy 6, (2018): 97-130