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Glasgow Museums secure John Michael Wright’s iconic Portrait of a Highland Chieftain
By Jo Meacock, 07.04.2020
John Michael Wright’s iconic painting, A Highland Chieftain: Portrait of Lord Mungo Murray (c.1683), a celebration of Highland dress and cosmopolitan Gaelic culture, has been secured for Glasgow Museums. This painting, which had been on loan to Glasgow Museums from The Allan and Carol Murray Collection since 2002, has been a key feature of the Scottish Identity in Art gallery in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum since its reopening post-refurbishment in 2006.
Scottish-trained artist John Michael Wright (1617–1694), scholar, collector and painter favoured by both Charles II and James VII of Scots and II of England, and by leading aristocrats, was known for his detail and realism. He shows Lord Mungo Murray (1668–1700), the fifth son of John Murray (1631–1703), 1st Marquess of Atholl, and Lady Amelia Sophia Stanley (1633–1702), as a powerful martial Highlander, wearing a feileadh mór, or belted plaid in a hunting tartan, woven with a complex red and green sett on a golden yellow ground. Mungo Murray stands with an imposing long gun made for hunting, his servant carrying his longbow and targe. A flock of wild goats, their implied quarry, graze in the background. However, this painting is a piece of pictorial theatre. The additional weapons Murray carries present him in the understood trope of a Highland warrior: a Scottish ribbon basket-hilted broadsword, a pair of ramshorn flintlock pistols of the type made in Doune and celebrated across Europe, and a lavishly-decorated dirk, the ornamental knotwork unique to the Gàidhealtachd.
Wearing an ostentatious silver and silver-gilt embroidered doublet and black bonnet with ostrich feather and pendant pearl, his hair fashionably long and curled, and striking a confident contrapposto pose that alludes to antique sculpture, the portrait also aligns him with courtly fashion and the cultural elite, demonstrating the cosmopolitan nature of Highland society at the time. However, Mungo Murray is only 15. This monumental painting is actually a coming-of-age portrait dramatically demonstrating the weight of responsibility on this young man’s shoulders as he sought to navigate familial expectation – his father was Keeper of the Privy Seal of Scotland. Unfortunately his story did not end well. Like many younger sons with no estate to inherit, he became part of Britain’s colonial story. Joining an expedition led by the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies to establish a Scottish settlement in Darien, Central America, he was killed by Spanish forces, who had arrived there first, in January 1700, aged only 32.
However, the significance of this painting for the study and understanding of Scottish national heritage and Highland culture cannot be understated. It provides invaluable historical information about Scotland’s position in Europe, and indeed the world; artistic patronage; the politics of tartan and development of Highland dress; fashionable dress and textiles as signifiers of conspicuous consumption; and the making and bearing of Scottish arms.
The painting will be explored throughout the year in an exciting programme of family events, educational talks, handling sessions and workshops that will enable visitors to delve more deeply into issues around Gaelic heritage, tartan myths, Scottishness, colonialism and transatlantic slavery, toxic masculinity and teenage culture. The Scottish Identity in Art gallery will receive a partial refresh, following community consultation, to bring the story of tartan up-to-date and create greater inclusivity and representation, taking into account the diversity that is Scotland today.
Dr Jo Meacock is Curator of British Art at Glasgow Museums
