Colonel Alastair Ranaldson Macdonell of Glengarry
Sir Henry Raeburn (1756 to 1823) · About 1812
A Highland chief stands full length in red tartan, a plaid over his shoulder, a bonnet with eagle feathers on his head, one hand resting on a musket. A basket-hilted sword hangs at his side and behind him, on the wall of a dim interior, hang more weapons and a targe. He looks off to the side with a proud, almost theatrical bearing. This is Alastair Ranaldson Macdonell, fifteenth chief of Glengarry, painted by Raeburn at the height of the Romantic fashion for all things Highland.
Raeburn painted directly on to the canvas without preliminary drawing, and you can see his bold, square brushwork in the tartan, which is suggested rather than described stitch by stitch. He was a master of dramatic lighting: the face and the white of the shirt catch the light while the rest of the figure sinks into warm shadow. The scale is life size, so the chief appears to stand in the room with you, exactly the effect Raeburn's clients paid for.
Glengarry himself was a difficult man, vain, quarrelsome and deep in debt, who cleared tenants from his lands while posing as the guardian of Highland tradition. He founded the Society of True Highlanders, fought a duel that ended in a death, and is thought to have inspired the character of Fergus MacIvor in Walter Scott's Waverley. He died in 1828 after jumping from a sinking steamer. The portrait, however, outlived his reputation and became one of the defining images of the Romantic Highlands, painted at exactly the moment when tartan was turning from a proscribed rebel dress into national costume.
Did You Know? Glengarry organised the Highland pageantry for King George the Fourth's visit to Edinburgh in 1822, the event that made tartan fashionable.
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