Unexpected Eardley

Holding a pencil and with her sketchbook open on an easel behind her, Queen Victoria, accompanied by her two eldest children, turns away from the magnificent view of Loch Laggan framed by mountains that she was capturing in watercolours, to acknowledge a passing gillie. Sir Edwin Landseer’s arresting painting captures a fleeting moment during Victoria’s holiday in Scotland in the summer of 1847, when she was staying at Ardverikie House on the shores of the loch. An album in the Royal Collection contains ten studies by the queen made during her stay there when, unwittingly, she also made an artistic contribution to posterity, in copying murals that Landseer had painted in the house which were later destroyed by fire.

A few years later, Landseer’s work was reproduced commercially, and the print’s title, ‘Her Majesty The Queen sketching at Loch Laggan’, emphasised both Victoria’s appreciation of Scotland’s spectacular scenery and her love of painting from nature. Her views around Loch Laggan reflect her beginnings as a landscape watercolourist under the tuition of the Scottish artist William Leighton Leitch, which began in September 1846. Leitch’s tuition was comprehensive, covering the principles of composition, colouring, light and shade, and he set Victoria homework by means of painstakingly constructed demonstration sheets for her to study and copy. After a few short months, Victoria proudly wrote to her lady-in-waiting and fellow amateur artist Charlotte Canning, stating: ‘I have made great progress in my Drawing since I saw you’. The improvement in the queen’s artistic skills from the late 1840s onwards coincided with Victoria and Albert’s discovery of the north-east of Scotland. In Deeside, they built a private residence, Balmoral Castle, which gave a welcome sense of freedom and privacy to enjoy family life. As she gained confidence as a watercolourist, Victoria’s bolder compositions and more painterly handling of colour were employed enthusiastically to record these new surroundings: ‘The Scenery all around is the finest almost I have seen anywhere. It is so wild & solitary, yet cheerful & beautifully wooded.’ The royal couple’s favourite local beauty spot was Lochnagar, the name of both a mountain and a loch on the Balmoral Estate – Albert thought Lochnagar ‘very like the Crater of Mount Vesuvius’, and Victoria described it as ‘one of the wildest, grandest things imaginable’. The queen painted the mountain and its surroundings over several decades from many viewpoints, paying close attention to different weather and light effects. Her watercolours are of a lyrical intensity that reflects her romantic, emotional attachment to the Scottish landscape; as she wrote to a relative in 1853, ‘I pine for my dear Highlands, which I get more attached to every year’. Victoria and Albert also commissioned several depictions of Lochnagar from professional artists, such as the view by the Aberdonian landscape painter James Giles, who was much patronised by the queen. The somewhat

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sparse and tonally muted treatment of the scene emphasises the landscape’s sublimity – a dramatic and romantic approach that would certainly have appealed to the queen and prince. Though arguably her best work in watercolours stemmed from her careful observation of nature, Victoria’s keen interest in other people also spilled over into her artistic practice. She often drew those around her, including her own children and those of household servants. She depicts Mary Symons and Lizzie Stewart (above), whose fathers both worked on the Balmoral Estate. As is clear from her inscription, the queen drew the girls on separate occasions but grouped them together on this sheet. Again, a professional artist also painted the ‘dear little lassies’, as Victoria described them. In his large, fluidly painted watercolour, Carl Haag dramatically frames the girls against a rainy, rocky landscape. Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert wholeheartedly (and probably unwittingly) subscribed to an idealised view of Scotland and the Highlands. They considered its people to be untouched by modernity, and envied what they perceived to be a better, simpler way of life, close to nature. In this they were significantly influenced by the romantic portrayal of Scotland’s history and landscape presented in the poetry and novels of Sir Walter Scott. ‘Oh! Walter Scott is my beau ideal of a poet; I do so admire him in both Poetry and Prose!’, enthused the teenage Victoria in her diary. On an expedition to Loch Muick some years later, she recorded that ‘the beauty, poetry & wildness of the scene . . . quite put me in mind of Walter Scott’s lines in “The Lady of the Lake”.’ Scott’s works also provided picturesque subject matter for another of Victoria’s artistic endeavours which is perhaps lesser known. During her first pregnancy in 1840, the queen and her husband whiled away the time learning to make etchings. Over the next few years, the couple produced prints of a variety of subjects, often working collaboratively, as with the imaginative scene illustrating an episode from Scott’s novel Woodstock, which Albert designed and Victoria etched. After Albert’s untimely death at the age of 42 in 1861, Balmoral became a sanctuary for the widowed queen. William Leighton Leitch wrote of his relief when, in 1863, Victoria resumed painting and drawing. She undoubtedly achieved a little solace through her sketchbook and colourbox, making views of the places she had first discovered with such joy in the company of her beloved husband.

Carly Collier is assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Royal Collection Trust

Victoria & Albert: Our Lives in Watercolour

Until 3 October The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Canongate, The Royal Mile, Edinburgh, EH8 8DX T: (0)303 123 7306 | rct.uk Open: Thursday to Monday 9.30am–6pm

1 Sir Edwin Landseer, Queen Victoria at Loch Laggan, 1847

2 Queen Victoria, [Ardverikie] & Loch Laggan from a road near the house, 1847

3 Queen Victoria, Loch Nagar – from Craig Guie above the Kirk, 1859

4 James Giles, Lochnagar, 1850

5 Queen Victoria, Mary Symons [and] Elizabeth Stewart, 1850

6 Queen Victoria, Scene from Scott's Woodstock, 1841

7 Carl Haag, Lizzie Stewart and Mary Symons, 1853 Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021

ALISON WATT: A PORTRAIT WITHOUT LIKENESS

Susannah Thompson

Acclaimed contemporary artist Alison Watt’s fascination with the work of 18th-century portrait painter Allan Ramsay forms the inspiration for her new body of work at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Against dark blue gallery walls hang 18 very calm, very still paintings. Outside, the summer heat and light and Saturday crowds are intense and oppressive, making this low-lit, top floor room at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery feel even more like a sanctuary than it might on a dark, cool November. The exhibition, A Portrait Without Likeness, presents the work of two artists: two major works by the 18th-century Edinburgh-born painter Allan Ramsay, and 16 new paintings by contemporary artist Alison Watt, made in response to Ramsay’s portraits of women. Over the last 25 years, Alison Watt’s best-known works have been large-scale paintings of drapery and fabric in exhibitions such as Fold (Fruitmarket, 1997) and Shift (2000, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), perhaps leading us to believe that the artist’s route to Ramsay was via his drapery painter, Joseph Van Aken. But Watt, like Ramsay, initially came to prominence for her portraiture and figurative works. Her interest in responding to work of the past has also been an enduring concern: the 2008 exhibition Phantom at the National Gallery, London, included her response to 17th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán’s ‘St. Francis in Meditation’ (1635–9), and a number of her early works bear the influence of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, such as ‘Source III’ of 1995 which references Ingres’s 1814 ‘Grande Odalisque’, or ‘Sleeper’, of 1996, which cites Ingres’s 1842 ‘Odalisque with Slave’. ‘Venus Frigida’ (1611) by Peter Paul Rubens and the haunting 1970s photographs of Francesca Woodman have also fascinated Watt and generated works in response. Far from a change of direction, then, A Portrait Without Likeness extends Watt’s commitment to exploring the history of painting and goes back to an interest in still life which was present all along. Early figurative works, such as the 1995 triptych ‘Anatomy’, make this clear. The new exhibition also continues Watt’s preoccupation with painting textiles: the handkerchiefs, collars and ribbons of ‘Keppel’, ‘Walpole’, ‘Bayne’, ‘Balcarres’ and ‘Anne’ (all 2019–20) make up almost one third of this series. Her palette has remained characteristically pale, muted and harmonious, as though the paintings were designed for the high ceilings and neoclassical hues of Edinburgh’s New Town, just outside the gallery (and the home of some of Ramsay’s Enlightenment sitters as well as Watt’s current studio). The exhibition follows a period of intensive research by Watt into the collection of paintings, drawings and sketchbooks by Ramsay held by the National Galleries of Scotland. Some of these works are included in A Portrait Without Likeness, others as part of the fantastic Scots in Italy display in the next room.

The 16 works by Watt seem to isolate details from Ramsay’s portraits of women, presenting fragments in close-up: his two wives, Anne Bayne and Margaret Lindsay, are represented by a pink ribbon necklace (‘Anne’, 2019) and a rose (‘Lindsay’, 2019); a lace collar, ‘Balcarres’ (2019-20), appears to be lifted from his painting of the Countess of Balcarres; a book, from his portrait of Caroline Fox, is shown in ‘Fox’ (2019). But are these objects simply citations ‘after Ramsay’ or is it the viewer who makes this assumption? Looking closely, tiny inconsistencies appear: the scale of objects is adjusted, shadows fall in different places, other details (the hazelnuts in ‘Boscawen’) are omitted. With careful attention, then, the paintings reveal an artist in dialogue with Ramsay’s work, not one concerned with verbatim quotation. In this sense, the paintings might represent the results of an artist’s experiential, immersive absorption in historic works of art, a visual counterpart to the experiment in writing which occurs in TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death, a prolonged meditation on Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Calm’ and ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’. Scottish painting has often been characterised by its colourist and expressive tendencies, its gestural, bold use of the brush. But there is a parallel tradition to which both Ramsay and Watt belong. In Watt’s case, as a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, a painterly heritage can be traced through a trajectory which includes artists such as Maurice Greiffenhagen, James Cowie and Hugh Adam Crawford. It is a tradition of Scottish painting that favours precision, incisive line and a glacial, harmonious tonality and which looks to quattrocento painting in terms of colour, light, draughtsmanship and neoclassicism in its smooth surface and brushwork. These qualities, including a deep awareness of art historical precedent, are all present in A Portrait Without Likeness. In considering Ramsay’s work, has Watt, in the words of Joshua Reynolds, regarded the older paintings ‘as models . . . to imitate, and at the same time as rivals with whom to contend’? In ‘Boscawen’ (2019), the object depicted by Watt is a cabbage leaf, almost identical to the leaf held in the hand of Frances Boscawen, painted by Ramsay c.1747–8. It is an eccentric, ambiguous attribute – does it refer to Boscawen’s fecundity or her love of gardening? How is narrative or biography elicited and evoked by this intriguing object? The leaf recalls a similar motif in an early work by Watt – ‘Pears’ (1994) – in which five pears rest in the groin of a nude, reclining woman, generating similar narrative ambiguity. In a recent interview, Watt has spoken of her interest in the relationship between the genres of still life and portraiture, describing still life as an ‘incredibly intimate’ form of biography. Because we attach so much meaning and significance to certain objects, Watt has claimed, they can be seen as a reflection of us. If this is the case, the still life can become ‘a portrait without likeness’. These objects Watt depicts could also be regarded as secular attributes, symbols infused by the aura of their sitter, painted to connote their simultaneous absence and presence. Or perhaps the objects are a kind of relic, ‘inhabited’ by their sitter? After all, most of the objects are named after the women they symbolise: a ribbon becomes ‘Anne’ (2019); a book contains Caroline ‘Fox‘ (2019); a collar, ‘Balcarres’ (2019) retains the trace of Anne, Countess of Balcarres. Do these works look at one another and engage in conversation, as Watt does with Ramsay? For all of their beauty, there is a sense of doubling, splitting and haunting in these paintings, bringing a ghostly, uncanny frisson to this cool, contemplative show.

Susannah Thompson is an art historian, writer and critic and head of doctoral studies and professor of contemporary art and criticism at The Glasgow School of Art

Alison Watt: A Portrait Without Likeness

Until 9 January 2022 Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org Open: Thursday to Saturday 10am–5pm (entrance currently by pre-booked ticket only)

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Allan Ramsay, The Artist's Wife: Margaret Lindsay of Evelick (c.1726 - 1782), 1755-56. National Galleries of Scotland. Bequest of Lady Murray of Henderland 1861

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Alison Watt (b. 1965). Centifolia, 2019. Collection of the Artist © Alison Watt

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COP26: WHAT IS ‘ENVIRONMENTAL ART’?

Emma Nicolson

As world leaders prepare to converge on Glasgow to tackle the climate emergency at the COP26 summit, Emma Nicolson – head of creative programmes at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh – reflects on how artists in Scotland have contributed to the climate debate by engaging with environmental issues

The art world loves a label, and there have been many given to art which addresses environmental and climate issues since the late 1960s: land art, earthworks, site-specific art, destination art, ecological art, eco-art and environmental sculpture. So would it be fair to call this work environmental art and, if so, what is environmental art? Certainly the undeniable beauty of works by landscape artists James Morrison or Barbara Rae move us to appreciate nature but would you consider it environmental art? In fact, the use of the word landscape indicates a view of, the act of looking, whereas I feel work that engages with the environment is all-encompassing. Our relationship between the ‘environment’ and the ‘arts’ is constantly shifting and changing. It is one thing to be inspired by nature, but it is quite another to engage with it in an environmental capacity as an artist.

At its essence, I feel contemporary environmental art sees artists go further by addressing environmental concerns or working with science, or demonstrating some kind of intention that relates to an ecological or conservation issue. It could be a social context, or the historical context around something, or a very specific scientific relationship. For that reason, I would like to suggest that the 19th-century female botanists were the first kind of environmental artists who were engaging with environmental concerns because they were excluded from science and botany was considered to be a gentle subject. Recently as part of our work with Cooking Sections (the artistic duo of Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), we featured a list of these Scottish trailblazing women, women who collected seaweed and made beautiful pressed herbarium specimens which have their own artistic quality and encourage us to understand our relationship with the environment a little bit better. The land art movement of the 1960s saw artists engage with the environment in a very literal sense and in so doing highlighted the catalysing effect of environmental awareness on artists. In this his centenary year, it’s important to remember the arrival of Joseph Beuys here in Scotland in 1970. At the provocation of the inimitable Richard Demarco, Beuys’ work in Scotland and engagement with the environment here not only transformed his

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