One kilt, several looks. A canny Scot's take.

[creagdhubh]

On the contrary, I see similar strange proportions in several of the portraits. The most obvious are John Grant


...who's head seems rather too small to me, and


...Ewan MacPherson, who's head is too small, and who's left arm seems to be suffering from the same disjointed nature as John Campbell.

I'm aware that MacLeay tweaked body proportions to make many of his subjects seem more 'heroic' or 'majestic' than they might have been in real life, but I think he got those aforesaid figures slightly wrong.

I don't mean to take away from what are otherwise superb works of art. I'm not best qualified to be an art critic, being barely able to draw stick figures myself.

I respectfully disagree. As a trained portrait painter with credentials (B.F.A., M.Ed. in Art Education) in oil-painting, drawing, anatomy drawing, sculpture and art history, I believe that MacLeay's compositions of his Highland sitters, and the manner in which he painted them, are, indeed correct. As an fine art undergraduate student, I continually learned throughout a multitude of figure painting/drawing classes that when standing erect, an individual (sitter/model) is typically on average "8 heads high." That is you take the length of the sitter's head (from the very top of the head to the bottom of their chin) and beginning at the top, extend down to their feet, utilising the head length as a rough guide as you travel down.

Kenneth MacLeay, RSA and his wonderful portfolio of work, is such a fine example of a classicly trained (Royal Scottish Academy) Victorian Era miniature/watercolour portrait painter. The detail and colour relationships he achieves is superb and deserves to be looked at over and over...as I tend to do with my own copy of Delia Millar's, The Highlanders of Scotland.