AN Icon with a right big capital I this week, readers. Ye’ll ken the Monarch of the Glen. Not the TV series but the oil painting of a proud red stag at bay in a misty Highland landscape of jaggy mountains and dark, glowering skies.
The beastie appears triumphant, master of all it surveys; poor, deluded, cloven-hoofed ruminant that it was.
This is Scotia, majestic, wild and free, doubtless moments before the magnificent creature was shot inexpertly by a tweed-engulfed, droopy-moustached accountant from Surbiton. Scotland brought to heel by milksops, as per.
So much about this painting from 1851 is right – and wrong. Firstly, it was, as you’ve probably guessed, the work of an Englishman, Sir Edwin Landseer. Secondly, while the landscape isn’t identified and is possibly generic (though we doubt it), a golf estate in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, has claimed it had deer at the time and that the beastie was one of its own.
Sounds plausible. I say, is there anybody behind me? If so, would you mind zipping up the back of my heid? Thanks. Honestly, there’s no end to this sort of stuff, as regular readers of this series well know. We’re not allowed to claim anything as ours: kilts, haggis, bagpipes. It was always the Etruscans, the Incas, the English, the Chinese, the Martians that did it first.
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Ach weel. This one’s no biggie. Apart from being a rather fetching depiction, the main value of the world-famous Monarch is that it symbolises a time when the Highlands were all the rage, a fashionable, fictional fairyland fomented first (apologies for all the genuinely accidental effing) by orotund scribe Sir Walter Scott and then by top heid-the-baw Queen Victoria.
It was the culmination of the post-Culloden rehabilitation of the Highlands from unforgiving, barren land inhabited by gibberish-speaking savages to spectacular, untamed, beautiful wilderness amidst which braw lusty fellows in exotic habiliments strode purposefully through the heather, kilts periodically lifting like Marilyn Monroe’s skirt as they farted freely in the hills and glens, untrammelled by the perfumed trappings of civilisation.
Rich pickings
THE website European Romanticisms in Association (catchy) refers to “a cultural appropriation of Scottish symbols and leisure activities by wealthy English landowners”. But it wasn’t just toffs. Middle-class suburban families bought engravings (many made by Landseer’s brother), as did those leaving for a better life elsewhere to serve as idealised reminders of the otherwise rubbish place they’d left behind.
By the mid-20th century this phenomenon had died down somewhat, though the Monarch minced on regardless, having provided, as the Sunday Herald put it in 2005, “the ultimate biscuit tin image of Scotland”. And not just biscuit tins. It was on whisky bottles, soup tins and advertising for Pears soap (“Dogs will tear your face off when you wash it with Pears”).
So, what was the fons et origo of this innocent but controversial image? Well, born in Marylebone in 1802, Landseer first visited Scotland in 1824 and appears to have become intoxicated by the old slum, where he met anglicised landowners and his literary hero Sir Walter Scott.
From the 1830s, he produced detailed studies of stags – usually being hunted by nutters – and, in 1850, was commissioned to paint three scenes of killing for pleasure for the Refreshment Rooms of the House of Lords. One of these was The Monarch.
However, in a surprisingly perfidious development amidst controversies around the cost of new works of art for Parliament, Westminster refused to grant the £150 (around £18,000 today) promised, so the paintings were sold to private collectors.
Thus, the Monarch passed from the Earl of This to Baron That to Pears Soap, as previously mentioned, then to Dewar’s distillery, which was gobbled up by Diageo, who loaned it to the National Museum of Scotland in yonder Edinburgh.
Spirit of commerce
AFTER 17 years on display there, in 2016 Diageo announced it was selling the painting, as it had “no direct link to our business or brands”. The following year, a deal was agreed whereby Diageo would accept half the £8 million valuation if the National Galleries of Scotland could raise the £4million.
This was achieved through a public appeal which saw donations from a fiver from misty-eyed old duffers to £2.75 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Today, the painting is on display at the Scottish National Gallery, Embra.
In 2019, Christopher Baker, then Director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at the National Galleries, drew attention to the amount of detail in the stag’s representation, “such as the moisture around his nostrils” and even the “deftly painted” eyelashes.
In addition the Monarch, simultaneously exhilarated and still, is indeed a “royal” or twelve-point stag, a reference to the number of tines on its antlers.
Baker, an honorary professor at Embra Yooni, noted that the veracity of Landseer’s depiction was “based on careful studies made in Scotland and London, and on … landed estates across England”.
As to the location in the painting, Glen Affric is most often adduced. In her memoirs, Lady Aberdeen recorded that the painter had been a visitor to her home on the family estate there.
As to the painter himself, though Monarch was his most famous painting, Landseer produced many more works featuring animals, including the bronze lions in Trafalgar Square which, Baker noted, “have become a symbol of ‘Britishness’, while the Monarch remains above all a Scottish icon”.
Landseer was the favourite painter of braw Hielan’ lassie Queen Victoria, and other works of his included representations of the royal family living the Highland idyll at Balmoral and the Queen landing at Loch Muick, where she had a hunting lodge – as if the podgy oaf could hit a dart board with a javelin.
Cup finally empty
DESPITE all his acclaim and success, fuelled by alcohol and medication, Landseer suffered mental health problems and finally went off his onion in 1872, dying the following year.
His relations with Victoria and the romantic Highland movement later gave rise to questions about “Balmorality”, not least because the growth of “sporting” estates went hand-in-hand with the Highland Clearances.
In the Guardian, Mark Brown asked perspicaciously: “Is an elitist celebration of hunting in the Highlands, ignoring the displacement of working families in the 19th century, politically unpalatable?”
In the Sunday Herald in 2005, Moira Jeffrey quoted novelist and poet James Robertson saying the image of Scotland as “empty, untamed and the playground of royalty and aristocratic huntsmen” was now redundant.
However, it remained historically and culturally important as “it tells us so much about how a certain kind of Victorian perceived Scotland”.
