BY HER ROYAL HAND
Queen Victoria’s love affair with Scotland led the monarch to create impressive paintings and sketches which capture the raw beauty of the Highland landscape, finds Rosie Morton
Queen Victoria drew great artistic inspiration from Scotland
The history books have been less than kind to Queen Victoria, remembering her as an austere, strait-laced monarch garbed in her widow’s weeds. But this one-dimensional cliche far from encapsulates the monarch’s personality; a lively intellectual and dedicated artist with an extraordinary talent for rich watercolours and intricate ink sketches, there was far more to Victoria than many critics give her credit for. Frequently disappearing into the hills surrounding Balmoral Castle – a place she dubbed her ‘Dear Paradise in the Highlands’ – her creativity truly came into its own.
Visiting Scotland several times throughout the 1840s and taking on the lease for Balmoral in 1848, the artistic inspiration afforded to both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in Royal Deeside was abundant. As great patrons of the arts, they collected and commissioned vast numbers of Scottish paintings from eminent artists like Sir Edwin Landseer, and indeed put paintbrush to paper themselves as a means of privately recording their travels through the hills and glens.
Though largely drawn to the medium of watercolour, Victoria experimented with inks, pastels and printmaking, and it was a pastime she wholeheartedly shared with Albert. One of the earliest Scottish works held in the Royal Collection, ‘View from the Sitting Room Window at Blair Atholl’, dates to September 1844 and was ‘sketched by VR and coloured by Albert’ while staying with Lord and Lady Glenlyon, according to the painting’s accompanying inscription.
‘Victoria and Albert find the mountains they encounter in the Highlands breathtaking,’ says Carly Collier, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Royal Collection Trust. ‘And that’s really reflected in Victoria’s watercolours of Scottish scenery. She focuses on the landscape, on the mountains, and she’s interested in weather effects and textures.’
Victoria started drawing as a child and pursued
art throughout her reign with the help of several tutors, including William Leighton Leitch who taught her for over 22 years. But even to the untrained eye her Scottish works are notably different to those she produced south of the border, and Freya Spoor, assistant curator of National Galleries of Scotland, confirms this.
‘The estate at Osborne, for instance, was very manicured and managed,’ she says. ‘There, she often painted a view from a room, to the extent of putting the window frame around the composition,
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Balmoral was a place she dubbed her ‘Dear Paradise in the Highlands’
The Queen felt freed from official duties in this wilderness
creating the sense she’s removed from the landscape, whereas her Scottish views are mainly of her being out and about in the landscape, seeing it first-hand. The views are rough and ready, with peat bogs and heather and bracken. It’s wilder and more unkempt than her English watercolours.’
Thanks to her prolific journal writing, it is well documented that the Queen felt freed from official duties in this wilderness, enjoying the simplicity of their existence at Balmoral as well as its many sporting opportunities. She had time to admire the beautiful in the everyday; a sentiment reflected in her journal entry on 25 August 1849, when painting her ‘View from the walk near the Dee in Balmoral Grounds’.
‘A dull morning,’ she wrote, ‘which turned a very fine, very hot day. Sat sketching by the riverside, & while I was doing so, saw an old woman ford the Dee, in this extraordinary manner.’
If circumstance would not allow her to paint in-situ, Victoria would often continue her Scottish pieces back at Windsor or in London, and would make copies of Leitch’s landscapes, developing her weather effect techniques. Clarkson Stanfield, a prominent English marine painter of the time, once admired one of Victoria’s paintings in Leitch’s studio, not realising it had been done by the royal hand. ‘She paints too well for an amateur,’ he said. ‘She will soon be entering the ranks as a professional artist.’
After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Victoria focused even more intently on landscapes, drawing less figurative sketches as time went on. ‘My personal feeling is that she gets a huge amount of solace from painting in Scotland; from being outside,’ says Collier. ‘She finds it in many ways therapeutic.’
Developing a close relationship with her famed Highland servant John Brown, she would sometimes use him as a source
of inspiration. The Fife Arms Hotel in Braemar holds a remarkable piece completed on 6 October 1874, ‘A stag shot by John Brown’.
‘The piece we have is a pencil and watercolour sketch,’ says Lorraine Grant, art and cultural programme manager for Scotland, who also curated The Fife Arms collection. ‘By anyone it would be a beautiful piece, but it’s just so fascinating that it’s actually from Victoria’s hand. There is the added personal resonance that the stag was shot by John Brown. She becomes very real through that work.’
As Professor John Morrison, head of school of history and heritage at the University of Lincoln, points out, being a female artist at that time meant the reception of Victoria’s paintings would have been mixed had they been on public display. ‘On the one hand, they’re the productions of a woman and the 19th century would have therefore pigeonholed them in that lesser category of “women’s art”; but on the other hand, they are the productions of the Queen of the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.
‘Because Victoria’s such a popular Queen, her promotion of Scotland is enormously influential on the way people feel and think about Scotland. By the beginning of the 19th century, people are talking of its beauty, its empty grandeur, its romance and the nobility of its people.’
Indeed, her marked impact on
Highland life can still be seen in the way people view Scotland today. ‘She even had an impact on Highland cows,’ says Spoor. ‘It was the red ones she particularly liked, to the point that the other colours – light blondes and browns – were almost bred out of existence. She had this great impact on tropes of our national identity.’
Feeling far removed from her stately duties down south, Victoria embarked on a lifelong association with Royal Deeside and embraced everything from its tartan to its tastes and traditions. In many ways becoming a romantic tourist, sketching picture-perfect scenes as a means of documenting her happy times in Scotland, Victoria’s art shows another side to the lady struck by a great sorrow that defined the second half of her reign. Knowing those same hills and glens that inspired such peace in the monarch still stand proud today makes her work all the more remarkable.
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Victoria’s art shows another side to the lady struck by a great sorrow