The Monarch of the Glen: Landseer in the Highlands
Until July 10; Royal Scottish Academy Building

Rarely does an exhibition make my blood boil, but The Monarch of the Glen has me seething.

It’s not, as you might expect, because of Victorian painter Edwin Landseer’s unremitting lust for animal blood; it’s not even because the Highland people are shown to be on a par with the animals, charmingly primitive, and at the gracious mercy of their aristocratic owners. It’s because the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) are clearly at home with this pernicious Victorian attitude, and, unbelievably in this day and age, they’re happy to promote it. Indeed, this exhibition seems targetted exclusively at those for whom the family seat is not a sofa.

Everybody knows the Monarch of the Glen. The lofty stag stands firm on a mountain top, his majestic antlers spreading from corner to corner while chalky blue Scotch mist swirls all around. Whether we like it or not, this stag is, for many, the embodiment of Scotland. That makes it all the more shocking to realise that Landseer will have shot it dead, and disembowelled it, for fun.

From his early twenties, the London painter made annual trips to Scotland for the hunting season, staying on the estates of his aristocratic friends and patrons. He completed numerous paintings of dead and dying deer, towered over triumphantly by dukes with outsized sporrans and more tartan than you could shake a sgian dubh at.

In Landseer’s early works the dead animals are painted with more vibrancy than the live ones, the latter refusing, presumably, to stay still. Contemporary critics often complained that Landseer’s human subjects were stiff and unconvincing. From the age of eleven, the painter had been trained to dissect animals for a better understanding of their anatomy, something he clearly couldn’t do with his aristocratic sitters. So, the chances are that The Monarch of the Glen was actually as dead as a doornail.

The metaphor is striking. In thrall to the romantic visions of the late Sir Walter Scott, Landseer’s contemporaries displayed a unique flair for ruthlessly destroying highland communities, while simultaneously recasting their culture as a chocolate-box fantasy.

This was the mid-19th century, and the central Highlands were all the rage. One of Landseer’s best customers, Queen Victoria, loved the area so much that she built her holiday home at Balmoral. The Duchess of Bedford, another of Landseer’s customers and reputedly his lover, built a series of “huts” in Glenfeshie where she pretended to go native. All visitors were obliged to wear highland dress and sleep on heather mattresses.

Meanwhile the highland people were struggling to survive, having been cleared from their land by the same ruling classes. Sheep were more profitable to keep than people, and increasingly, aristocrats found it worth their while to empty out their estates for hunting, shooting and fishing. Many Gaels were forced to head across the Atlantic, and those who remained had to deal with the deprivations of insanitary housing, the loss of their livelihoods and the potato famine.

This is not what we see in Landseer’s paintings. The locals are poor but noble; simple and sweet; charming in their turf-topped “bothies”. They are portrayed as character types, in contrast to the individual portraits of the lords and ladies in all their tartan finery. They are, in other words, grouped with the animals, as fine beasts of noble sentiment.

A Highland Breakfast makes the link explicit, depicting a breastfeeding woman in her home, right next to a breastfeeding dog. If that doesn’t convince you then take a look at Comical Dogs, showing two terriers in the same costumes that Landseer reserves for his Highland character types.

Group paintings, like The Death of the Stag in Glen Tilt, reinforce the social hierarchy. The faithful keeper is on his knees, along with the hounds and the dead stag. He and the dogs look adoringly towards the Duke of Atholl, who towers above them.

Edwin Landseer’s paintings are a fascinating insight into upper class Victorian minds, revealing some of the cruelties inherent in their thinking. The quality of the paintings themselves is not in dispute, but it is inexcusable to mount such an exhibition without providing a full 21st century analysis.

There is an excellent catalogue essay by historian TC Smout, but apart from that, the NGS appears to be on Landseer’s wavelength. The Clearances are pushed under the carpet while captions enthuse about the intermarriage of this “noted beauty” with that “dashing” duke, and their consequent official title. The highlander’s house is consistently described as a “bothie”, preserving Victorian sentimentality along with its spelling.

Worst of all, rumour has it that the Director-General of the National Galleries wanted to line the stairs with stuffed deer heads and to place a whole stuffed stag in the centre of the gallery; thank goodness he was stopped. People have joked for years that the National Galleries are stuck in Victorian times. This, finally, is the proof.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 24.04.05