Robert Burns and the visual arts: Portraiture, national landscapes, and the context of monuments

Through consideration of landscapes and monuments, this chapter goes beyond the portrait of Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth whilst acknowledging its significance. That significance is considered both in terms of the poet’s features (not least as explored by sculptors making memorials to Burns) and in terms of a tradition of art to which the portrait relates, namely European landscape painting. That landscape tradition underpins Nasmyth’s development of a sense of national landscape in Scotland. Such landscapes can in turn be seen as the context for monuments to Robert Burns, not least through David Octavius Hill’s series of images for The Land of Burns. Particular note is taken of the Greek revival work of Thomas Hamilton both at Alloway and in Edinburgh in the first third of the nineteenth century and the classical context those monuments gave for the first statue of Burns, that by John Flaxman, completed in 1826. The international distribution of statues in honour of Burns is explored through those made in the 1880s by John Steell, whose statues are sited in New York, Dundee, London, and Dunedin. A theme considered throughout is the significance of illustrated editions of Burns such as The National Burns, and their presence as aesthetic objects in their own right. Consistent with that, I note throughout the ‘hidden’ artists of the editions: the engravers.