Scottish glints
'Strategic light' at Edinburgh's National Gallery of Scotland
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What makes a painting catch your eye? What makes a picture grab you when you enter its room, even though you haven’t got to it yet and six other visitors are crowded around it?
I wondered that at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh yesterday when I saw two of its most famous paintings in its permanent collection: The Monarch of the Glen by Edwin Landseer and The Skating Minister, attributed to Henry Raeburn. Part of the answer lies in the smallest elements of each image: the highlights.
In The Monarch of the Glen Landseer is fashioning a symbol of Scotland’s wild and untamable landscape. The foundation of the image is the stag’s great swathe of powerful muscle in the centre of the painting, mostly a deep brown. This is what meets you at eye level in the gallery. But there has to be grandeur here too, not just brute force. This means the eye has to be drawn upwards, and for that there needs to be variation away from just fur.
Landseer gradually lightens his colour palette around the stag’s neck, and puts a finer point on the mass of brown. To qualify as a ‘monarch’ stag, the animal must have 16 antler points. The tips of the antlers glow as the Highland light catches their sharp edges, gesturing towards the violent potential of Scotland’s wildlife, and by extension its national character.
The word ‘highlights’ doesn’t feel sufficient to fully explain the role these notes play in a painting like this. When an image is all about bristling life and intensity, nothing can be flat and dull. The stag must exude restlessness and even natural wisdom. ‘Highlights’, or to call it by another name, strategic light, is one of the only tools a painter has to carry this off. While the tips of the antlers are interesting, a particularly eye-catching light-burst is the large splodge of paint right on the end of the animal’s nose: on the canvass, it’s about 1.5cm squared of pure white. It’s the focal point for the whole painting and provides a simple anchor for the eye to begin to understand the rest of the image.
The Skating Minister, a painting of joyful juxtapositions and wry Scottish humour, is also about anchoring and balance. It’s very Father Ted: the buttoned-up symbol of Scottish authority, the dry Presbyterian minister, takes just the same attitude to the whimsical delights of skating as he does to preaching on a Sunday. The result is wonderfully silly.
Like the Monarch, there’s a large area of dark colour in the centre of the canvas, counterpoised with very fine detailing elsewhere. Raeburn (although there is some dispute over whether the true artist was in fact Henri-Pierre Danloux) selects the skates as a site of lightness and humour: to modern eyes, they look endearingly simple compared to our plastic version, but also very elegant: merely a flash of curved metal on the bottom of an arabesque foot.
The Skating Minister is an image of authority let loose, and the highlights are the key to creating the contrast and the humour. In both icons of Scottish art, the points of light are the things that add vitality to the seriousness, the wry smile breaking through on a dour face.
Edinburgh’s National Gallery is free to visit. The upper floor is currently closed due to the pandemic.