Abstract
In 2002, the Scottish photographic artist Calum Colvin exhibited Ossian: Fragments of Ancient Poetry at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Colvin produced a group of 25 large pictures of meticulously constructed sets with sizeable sculptured elements and an eclectic selection of props.1 The exhibition began with a projection of the mythological poet Ossian onto stone ruins (Figure 4.1). Through the opening sequence of nine photographs, the bard and the ruins are lit from different angles in orange and blue to produce a shifting chiaroscuro effect. Ossian gradually fades from view to be replaced in one image by the angel from Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, and in the next by two greyhounds. There is a sequence of painted portraits of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, followed in two images, rather curiously, by a Maori warrior with traditional tribal markings. The warrior transforms into a bonneted figure which resembles the twentieth-century Scottish music-hall entertainer Harry Lauder. The final picture is an eerily lit image of Ossian’s translator James Macpherson (1736–96). Colvin’s photographs are initially sparse and elegiac, but become increasingly cluttered with assorted objects (mostly highly coloured, in contrast with the sombre palette in which the central figures are depicted). The pictures feature tartan boxes, an illuminated globe, iced fairy cakes, electric fires, bath towels from Rangers and Celtic football clubs, a discarded plastic saltire, an antique slide projector, a record player, marshmallows, mugs, miniature whisky bottles, a paperback copy of Douglas Hurd’s nationalist thriller Scotch on the Rocks, an oriental fan and an LP cover for the accordion folk duo The Tartan Boys of Bonnie Scotland (Figure 4.2).
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Notes
See Tom Normand, Calum Colvin:OssianFragmentsofAncientPoetry (Ediburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, [2002]).
Murray Pittock’s ‘Extraordinary and Anticipated’, in Alexander Stoddart, Cabinet Works & Studies (Edinburgh: Bourne Fine Art, 2010), pp. 5–7.
See Munay Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Dafydd Moore, Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian; Myth, Genre, and Cultural Change (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)
James Macpherson, Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books: Together with Several Other Poems, Composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1762
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 70–71.
Details of Ossian’s eighteenth-century emergence were established by the Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland Appointed to Inquire into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian, [...] Edinburgh: Constable, 1805). Stone’s Gaelic translations are considered by Donald Mackinnon, ‘Collections of Ossianic Ballads by Jerome Stone’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 14(1887–88), 314–69
Derick S. Thomson, ‘Bogus Gaelic Literature c.1750–c.1820’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Glasgow, 5 (1958), 172–88
Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), p. 113
T. Bailey Saunders compares the ‘Book of the Dean of Lismore’ and Ossian in his The Life and Letters of James Macpherson (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1894), pp. 144–5
J. S. Smart makes the point about the fashionable poetry in his James Macpherson: An Episode in Literature (London: Nutt, 1905), p. 212
[Tobias Smollett], ‘Review of Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem’, Critical Review, 12(1761), 405–18, reprinted in Ossian and Ossianism, ed. by Dafydd Moore, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 2004)
Madame de Staël,On Politics, Literature, and National Character, trans. and ed. by Morroe Berger (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1964), pp. 125–6
See for example William Shaw, An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems Ascribed to Ossian (London: Murray, 1781), p. 10
Clement Hawes, The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 43.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 16.
See Clare O’Halloran, ‘Irish Re-Creations of the Gaelic Past: The Challenge of Macpherson’s Ossian’, Past and Present, 124 (1989), 69–95.
Miso-dolos [Sylvester O’Halloran], ‘The Poems of Ossine, the Son of Fiorrne Mac Comhal, Re-Claimed’, Dublin Magazine (January 1763), 21–3 (p. 23)
[Daniel Webb], Fingal Reclaimed (London: The author, 1762), p. 20
See Paul J. DeGategno, James Macpherson (Boston: Twayne, 1989), p. 135.
Steve Rizza, ‘“A Bulky and Foolish Treatise”? Hugh Blair’s Critical Dissertation Reconsidered’, in Ossian Revisited, ed. by Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 129–46
Gaskill, The Reception of Ossian in Europe, pp. 27–8; and The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. by Gaskill and intro. by Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996)
Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.38.
Margaret Rubel, Savage and Barbarian: Historical Attitudes in the Criticism of Homer and Ossian in Britain, 1760–1800 (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1978), p. 44.
Blair makes this clear in the appendix to A Critical Dissertation. See his ‘A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’, p. 401. See also Nick Groom, ‘Celts, Goths, and the Nature of the Literary Source’, in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, ed. by Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 275–96
See also Dafydd Moore’s discussion of Ossian’s martial aesthetic, ‘Heroic Incoherence in The Poems of Ossian’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2000), 43–59.
The events of the Seven Years’ War are taken from Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000).
See Thomson, The Gaelic Sources, p. 14; Donald E. Meek, ‘The Gaelic Ballads of Scotland: Creativity and Adaptation’, in Ossian Revisited, ed. by Gaskill, pp. 19–48; and John MacQueen, ‘Temora and Legendary History’, in From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations, ed. by Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 69–78.
Macpherson, Temora, An Ancient Poem in Eight Books (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1763), p. xviii.
Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 230.
See Charles O’Conor, A Dissertation on the First Migrations, and Final Settlement of the Scots in North Britain: with Occasional Observations on the Poems of Fingal and Temora (Dublin: Faulkner, 1766), p. 27.
Sylvester O’Halloran, An Introduction to the Study of the History and Antiquities of Ireland (Dublin: Ewing, 1772), p. 359.
See Rosemary Sweet, Antiquarians: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon, 2004), pp. 128–9.
William Stukeley, A Letter from Dr Stukeley to Mr Macpherson, on his Publication of Fingal and Temora (London: Hett, 1763), p. 7. Reprinted in Ossian and Ossianism, ed. Moore
John M. Gray, Notes on the Art Treasures at Penicuik House, Midlothian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1889), p. 63.
See Susan Booth, ‘The Early Career of Alexander Runciman and his Relations with Sir James Clerk of Penicuik’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32 (1969), 332–43
J. Duncan MacMillan, ‘Alexander Runciman in Rome’, The Burlington Magazine, 112 (1970), 21–31.
[Walter Ross], A Description of the Paintings in the Hall of Ossian, at Pennycuik near Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Kincaid and Creech, 1773), p. 22.
See Luke Gibbons, ‘“A Shadowy Narrator”: History, Art and Romantic Nationalism in Ireland 1750–1850’, in Ideology and the Historians, ed. by Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991), pp. 99–127
See Peter Holland’s discussion of the performance of King Lear in this period in his ‘The Age of Ganick’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Shakespeare on Stage, ed. by Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 69–91
See William L. Pressly The Life and Art of fames Barry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 57.
See Booth, ‘The Early Career of Alexander Runciman and his Relations with Sir James Clerk of Penicuik’, 341; Duncan Macmillan, Painting in Scotland: The Golden Age (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), p. 58a
Sam Smiles, Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 70
William L. Pressly James Barry: The Artist as Hero (London: Tate Gallery, 1983), p. 57b.
The fullest account of the reception of Wolfe’s death, from which this description derives, is Alan McNairn, Behold the Hero: General Wolfe & the Arts in the Eighteenth Century ([Quebec]: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).
See Robert C. Alberts, Benjamin West: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 108–9
Charles Mitchell, ‘Benjamin West’s “The Death of General Wolfe” and the Popular History Piece’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 7 (1944), 20–33
See Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 213c.
John Galt, The Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West, Esq.: President of the Royal Academy of London. Composed from Materials Furnished by Himself 2 parts in 1 vol. (London: Cadell & Davies, 1820), Part 2, pp. 46–50.
Edgar Wind, ‘The Revolution of History Painting’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2 (1938), 116–27
David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 212–13.
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Mitchell, S. (2013). Ossian, Wolfe and the Death of Heroism. In: Visions of Britain, 1730–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137290113_5
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