Stand on Princes Street today and the view south is the one thing about Edinburgh that everybody photographs: the gardens, the Mound, the Old Town piled up on the ridge, the castle on its rock.
Almost none of that existed in 1750. The gardens were a sewage lake. The Mound was not there. Princes Street was a field.
The Nor Loch
The valley now filled by Princes Street Gardens held the Nor' Loch, an artificial lake dammed in the fifteenth century to defend the north side of the castle rock. By the eighteenth century it had become the Old Town's open drain — a shallow, foul body of water that the city drained in stages from 1759 onwards.
What replaced it is the gap that makes the modern view possible. Before the draining there was no vantage point from which to see the Old Town as a silhouette, because you could not get far enough away from it without being in the water.
The New Town
In 1766 the city ran a competition for the design of a new town on the fields north of the loch. It was won by James Craig, who was twenty-six. Building began the following year and continued for decades: George Street on the ridge, Princes Street and Queen Street facing outward, Charlotte Square at one end and St Andrew Square at the other.
The Mound came out of the hole. Around two million cartloads of earth dug from the New Town foundations were tipped into the drained valley to make a crossing, informally at first — it was known as Geordie Boyd's Mud Brig after the clothier who started walking that way — and then formalised into the road that is there now.
What the painters saw
This is why the early views of Edinburgh are worth looking at rather than just liking. They are pictures of a city in the middle of the largest change it has ever undergone.
Alexander Nasmyth is the essential figure. Trained as a portraitist under Allan Ramsay, he turned to landscape and effectively invented the modern image of Edinburgh — the castle from the west, the city seen low across open ground, Princes Street with the Royal Institution going up on the newly made Mound. He was also a working engineer and designer, which shows: his townscapes are built rather than sketched.
David Roberts came out of Edinburgh as a house painter's apprentice and a theatre scene-painter before becoming one of the great architectural draughtsmen of the century. His views from the Calton Hill and from the castle have the theatrical staging you would expect and the accuracy of somebody who had painted flats for a living.
Patrick Nasmyth, Alexander's eldest son, painted the city from further out — from the Braid Hills to the south, low and pale on the horizon, with the countryside doing most of the work. It is the view that reminds you Edinburgh sits in a bowl of open country, which is obvious from the Braids and invisible from Princes Street.
Calton Hill
The hill at the east end of Princes Street was where Edinburgh put its ambitions. The Nelson Monument went up between 1807 and 1816. The National Monument — a copy of the Parthenon, intended as a memorial to the Napoleonic War dead — was begun in 1826, ran out of money after twelve columns, and has stood unfinished ever since.
It is usually called Edinburgh's Disgrace. It is also the single most recognisable thing on the skyline, which suggests the city got better value from the failure than it would have from the finished building.
What to hang
Historic Edinburgh prints do something a modern watercolour of the same view cannot: they show a place you can still stand in, at a moment you cannot. That is the whole appeal, and it is why a Nasmyth view holds a hallway better than a photograph of the same angle.
The wide views — Nasmyth from the west, Roberts from the Calton Hill — want a long wall and a large size. The Braid Hills view is quieter and works at 40 × 50 cm.
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