Scotland and the Origins of Modern Art
By Duncan Macmillan.256 pp. incl. 100 col. + 25 b. & w. ills. (Lund Humphries, London, 2023), £50. ISBN 978–1–84822–633–3.
by susannah thompsonDo the origins of modern art lie in the ideas of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy? Can one trace a trajectory from the work of eighteenth and nineteenth century Scots painters, such as Gavin Hamilton and David Wilkie, to that of later French artists, such as Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet? More broadly, was the ‘whole story’ of modern art ‘ultimately shaped by an exchange between art and philosophy’ (p.9) with its roots in Scotland? These are the central questions that form the foundations of this book by the Scottish art historian Duncan Macmillan.
Over the past forty years – from his book Painting in Scotland: The Golden Age (1986) to that under review, and the numerous articles, lectures and books in between – Macmillan has frequently returned to the argument that Scotland’s role in the development of modern art has been overlooked. He contends that it was the links between art and philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment that led, ultimately, to the emergence of modern European art. The idea is plausible given the Scots’ disproportionate impact on modernity in so many other fields, as outlined (if overstated) by Arthur Herman in How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001). A central component of Macmillan’s premise is his discussion of the philosopher Thomas Reid, who, while building on David Hume’s ideas concerning naturalism and empiricism, refuted his understanding of perception. Hume argued that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience, and therefore object and subject cannot be separated, whereas Reid believed that certain common sense principles were foundational to human understanding. Reid argued that perception is an intuitive response of the mind to physical sensations, but that this response is nevertheless a separate interaction with the actual world. In other words, Reid’s philosophy of moral sense placed intuition and the role of the imagination above reason.
Reid frequently used paintings to exemplify the distinction between the appearance of things – which might be affected by time, light and other conditions – and our knowledge of them as things.
Indeed, it is quotations from Reid that often provide the book’s most persuasive passages in support of Macmillan’s overarching thesis. Visual examples are used frequently to further substantiate his claims. Across the five parts that comprise the publication, there is frequent crossreferencing between text and image and an array of large, beautifully reproduced paintings by (primarily) Scottish and French artists, from Allan Ramsay to Gustave Courbet. The close analyses of paintings and sculptures are a particular strength of the book, and it is through his references to these works that Macmillan is able truly to develop his discussion.
Whereas in recent years the word ‘descriptive’ has been used pejoratively as shorthand for historical and critical writing that is afraid to make clear evaluative judgements or engage in interpretation, Macmillan demonstrates that such approaches are often embedded within descriptive passages. Thanks to the range and quality of the selected works Macmillan’s descriptions are highly detailed and often convincing in pursuit of his broader argument. Chapter 10, ‘Walter Scott, David Wilkie and the French painters’, is particularly notable in this respect.
The final chapter attempts to tie together and reiterate the fundamental assertions made in the preceding sections, using art to reignite ideas around the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France, which was established in 1295. Macmillan refers among other writers and philosophers to the progressive social thinker and ecologist Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), who, according to Macmillan, was ‘at the centre of a web of international connections' in Scotland (p.223). However, his comparative analysis of Scottish works of art with those by English and French artists – William McTaggart with John Constable, and Arthur Melville with Édouard Manet, for example – risks undermining the claims made so persuasively in earlier chapters. Regardless of Macmillan’s insistence and framing, and however we might wish it were otherwise, the examples of Scottish art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are simply not as compelling or significant as their French counterparts.
There is also a distinctly unproblematised usage of such words as ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarian’, and this reviewer registered a slightly problematic attitude towards women: in 2023 it surely is not
acceptable to refer to ‘Gauguin’s erotic adventures in the Pacific’ (p.229) without qualification. Moreover, despite a halfhearted attempt to include a smattering of women artists, women are largely present here as subjects, usually nudes. If readers have an issue with Macmillan’s claims, they are as likely to concern the very notion of national identity as the basis for categorising and historicising art as they are with the central argument in itself. If some readers find the notion of art history as a teleological progression over time unconvincing, or regard the Enlightenment project as fraught with moral problems, then the very basis of the book will for them be on shaky ground: even if Macmillan succeeds in ‘Scotwashing’ modern art, to what end?
The author’s stated aim is to ‘make the distinguished story of Scotland’s art more readily available and so to become a proper object of the nation’s pride’ (p.251). Whether or not readers finish the book in support of its central idea that formal experimentation in modernist painting has its beginnings in Scottish philosophy, there is much to be learned from the publication. Of note are the unusual and surprising connections and affinities between many of the figures discussed, supporting the idea of the art world’s reliance on what we would now call networking or social capital. Hamilton, for example, appears to have kept an open studio, and acted an advisor and overseer to other painters, taking many under his wing.
Until recently, Macmillan, along with such fellow Scottish art historians as Murdo Macdonald, was one of few scholars to have consistently attempted to establish and promote the idea of a distinctive Scottish history of art. Macmillan’s survey Scottish Art: 1460–2000 (2000) has long been regarded as a foundational source on the subject, partly because of the absence of others, but also because of his deep knowledge of and commitment to his subject. In spite of an undoubtedly partisan perspective, a somewhat paternalistic tone and a (sometimes) highly selective framing of what constitutes or is representative of Scottish art, his publications on the subject continue to be benchmarks in the field, even for those who do not accept all his arguments. His latest book is similarly useful in providing a solid bulwark of scholarship to which a younger generation of historians can respond and offer critique while developing and extending his approach.