The Lady of the Woods

John MacWhirter 1839 - 1911

Summary

A silver birch tree in a sparsely-wooded valley. The valley stretches from the left foreground away to the right. About five sheep walk single file towards the viewer along a narrow path on the right slope. In the right foreground the silver birch tree dominates the picture, stretching into a blue and white sky. Brown bracken and green grass cover the ground. Just behind the birch is a rowan tree in berry. Other trees dot the right slope, while the left slope is more thickly covered in trees with narrow, twisted trunks. Other tall delicate trees with greenish foliage top the hill to the left, and blue peaks can be seen in the distance. A fallen silver birch trunk in the foreground lies across the sheep’s path.

Display Label

A Highland Romance: Victorian Views of Scottishness The popular idea of Scottishness in the 1800s came from Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), who fictionalised exciting episodes from Scottish history. He created a colourful Highland identity for his nation, based on the customs and landscape of the sparsely populated mountainous areas. For Lowland Scots – the majority of the population – it was a fiction they took up gladly, perhaps because it emphasised difference from the English. However, most Victorians, Scots and English, felt cultural difference to be perfectly compatible with political union. Queen Victoria’s regular visits to Scotland encouraged the English to view it as a simple country retreat. By the end of her reign her wealthier English subjects came to regard Scotland principally as an arena for shooting, fishing and golf. Artists from both sides of the border visualised the stags, castles, mountains and tartan that made up this Victorian myth. Their paintings reaffirmed impressions gleaned from Scott’s novels and from tourist guide books to Scotland. The fact that Scotland was an industrialised nation taking an active part in the British Empire was largely ignored. Popular art and literature fed the ‘tartan monster’, refining a checklist of clichés that even today remain key to the marketing of Scotland. A number of local industrialist patrons who bought paintings with Scottish subjects later gave them to Manchester Art Gallery. As a result the Gallery has a particularly good late Victorian collection. Here is ‘Scottishness’, as seen from Manchester in the late 1800s.