Richard Ansdell R.A. 1815-1885

Art Journal, 1855, pg. 178

ENGRAVED:
by Frederick Stacpoole for Henry Graves & Co. in 1858

Richard Ansdell turned to Scottish subjects in response to the great fashion for paintings of the Highlands that occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century. A vital spur to this fascination with the landscape and history of Scotland, was the writing of Sir Walter Scott, who for decades after his death in 1832 restrained a great popular readership throughout the English-speaking world. Although Scott's closest familiarity was with the Borders, many of his novels and plays had Highland settings, and in addition his antiquarian and archaeological works encouraged a wider interest in the region. The cult of the Highlands had been given mass-appeal by the visits made by members of the royal family from the early nineteenth century onwards. In 1822 George IV made a momentous visit to Edinburgh, and was greeted with tumultuous enthusiasm as the clans in full national costume turned out to greet him. Tartan was worn both by the King and his subjects, according to a new and elaborate style. New clan tartans were designed and it is said that forty additional looms were set up at the cloth works of Wilson in Bannockburn to meet the demand.

In 1855 when The English Gamekeeper and The Scotch Gamekeeper were painted, artistic interest in the Highlands was immense. Ansdell was at the height of his technical powers as proved by his winning of a Gold Medal at the International Exhibition in Paris with his highland painting of 1851 Turning the Drove, Aviemore and the Grampians in the Distance. At the same exhibition Sir Edwin Landseer also won a Gold Medal for a painting and it is interesting to note that the mastery of two artists' work was recognised in Europe as well as in Britain. Although Landseer's art was of a more melodramatic nature than that of Ansdell, the two artists shared a heart-felt admiration for the ghillies and highlanders. Landseer's imposing single figure of Queen Victoria's favourite ghillie Peter Coutts, entitled the Highlander of 1850 (The Royal Collection) is perhaps closest in composition but the figure is more awesome and monolithic, indeed less human. Ansdell was clearly purposefully challenging Landseer's monopoly over Highland subjects in the 1850s and his Turning the Drove, Aviemore and the Grampians in the Distance was clearly in part an homage to Landseer's A Scene in the Grampians, The Drover's Departure of c.1835 (Victoria and Albert Museum).

The critic for the 1855 Art Journal described the present picture thus: 'This is really a production of much excellence ; every item of the objective is well understood. It represents a gamekeeper on the moors, accompanied by his dogs, and surrounded by the spoils of a good day's sport, - grouse, blackcock, ptarmigan, woodcock, snipe, and smaller game. The man is seated on a piece of rock, and his head rises into relief against the sky. The dogs are drawn with great truth, and painted with surpassing skill; in short, it is equal to the very best pictures of its class.' (Art Journal, 1855, p. 178)

Ansdell's conception of highlanders was that shared by Sir Walter Scott, robust men in close communion with the Highlands themselves whose lives were perceived as noble and romantic. The corruptions of the increasingly industrialised world had unaffected the wild nature of the ghillies and their families whose life was so embroiled with the heather and stony crags, that they became almost part of the landscape, as inseparable as the herds of deer and the swathes of heather.