Nobody thought the Highlands were beautiful until surprisingly recently. For most of recorded history they were regarded, from Edinburgh and from London, as barren, dangerous and embarrassing — a problem to be pacified rather than a view to be framed.
How that reversed, and who painted it, is the story of Scottish landscape art.
Before the Highlands were scenery
Seventeenth and early eighteenth-century travellers described the mountains as deformed, horrid and useless. Land had value if it produced something. A glen produced very little.
What changed was partly fashion — the European taste for the sublime, the idea that a landscape could be worth looking at precisely because it was severe — and partly the fact that after 1746 the Highlands stopped being militarily frightening. A place is easier to admire once it cannot hurt you.
Alexander Nasmyth and the invention of the view
Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840) is usually called the father of Scottish landscape painting, and the title is roughly fair. He trained as a portraitist under Allan Ramsay, held radical politics that cost him portrait commissions among Edinburgh's conservative patrons, and moved into landscape partly by necessity.
He was also an engineer, a stage designer and a teacher, and he taught landscape painting to a large part of the Edinburgh middle class. His pictures are constructed: a foreground you can stand in, a considered middle distance, and the city or the loch placed exactly where the eye wants it.
What he established was the idea that a specific Scottish place, painted accurately, was a subject worth a serious painter's time.
Horatio McCulloch and the Highland picture
Horatio McCulloch (1805–1867) is the painter most responsible for how the Highlands look in the popular imagination — big weather, wet rock, a loch going silver under a break in the cloud.
He worked at scale and he worked from the places themselves, and his pictures were engraved and reproduced widely enough that they became the template. When somebody who has never been to Glencoe imagines Glencoe, they are usually imagining a McCulloch.
The one who painted air
William McTaggart (1835–1910) is the outlier and, to a lot of people who look hard at Scottish painting, the best of them.
A Campbeltown crofter's son who spoke Gaelic before English, he painted the Kintyre coast outdoors, at speed, in loose broken strokes with the canvas showing through — and he arrived at it independently, before most people in Britain had heard the word Impressionism. His subject is not really the sea or the shore. It is wind and light moving across them.
He is the reason it is wrong to treat Scottish landscape painting as a provincial echo of English or French developments.
The Farquharson snow
Joseph Farquharson (1846–1935) painted sheep in snow so often and so successfully that he was nicknamed Frozen Mutton Farquharson. It was meant unkindly and he had the last laugh: his winter Deeside pictures were among the most popular British paintings of their day.
They are also genuinely hard to do. Snow is white with almost nowhere to move, and Farquharson finds the blue, the pink and the low winter gold in it.
The Glasgow Boys change the subject
In the 1880s the younger painters stopped painting scenery and started painting fields. James Guthrie at Cockburnspath, E. A. Walton, E. A. Hornel in Galloway — the land is still the subject but it is worked land, with people in it doing a job.
It reads as unremarkable now. In 1883 it was close to a political position: a labourer's daughter in a cabbage field given the seriousness that had been reserved for stags and chieftains.
And then the colour
The Scottish Colourists took the landscape somewhere else again in the 1910s and 1920s. Cadell and Peploe on Iona painted the shore flat and undiluted — turquoise laid down as turquoise, no atmospheric softening — because that is what Hebridean shell sand actually does to light.
It is the last great turn in the story, and it is the point at which Scottish landscape painting stops being about place and starts being about paint.
What to hang
If you want the Highlands as everybody pictures them, McCulloch. If you want the coast as it actually feels, McTaggart. If you want Edinburgh and the Lowlands before the modern city, Nasmyth. If you want the one that changes a room, Iona.
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