Jacobite era tartans still in use today

[OC Richard]

I wonder if this was a bit of dramatic license on the part of the artist? If so, might not the tartan also be fancified?

This sort of thing comes up from time to time. They say "what's been seen cannot be un-seen" and it's true, it's difficult if not impossible for modern people to look at paintings done in the past without bringing to the old paintings many anachronisms. We've experienced Impressionism and Cubism and so forth and we're used to paintings diverging from reality and we throw about the term "artistic license".

However different time-periods in art had different sets of expectations; in 1715 Impressionism was 150 years in the future.

At the time those paintings were done the expectation was of near-fanatical precision regarding surface detail. Painters who couldn't accurately reproduce the tiniest detail of fabric, lace, buttons, etc wouldn't be able to get any commissions! Sometimes their knowledge of anatomy was lacking, and the landscape backgrounds were often fanciful, but we can be sure that fabrics etc are accurate.

A testimony to this (were any needed) is the way the pipes are painted in The Piper To The Laird Grant. I highly doubt if the painter was intimately familiar with bagpipes, yet he has painted the bag the exact colour of a sheepskin bag, and even captured the bag's seam. (I doubt the painter even knew that sheepskin bags had a seam, yet there it is.) Also note the cord which is binding the chanter stock into the bag. Every rosette on the piper's coat is carefully recorded. I think we can assume that the costumes are quite accurate.

Peter I'll have to disagree about the binding. It's absolutely clear that the same edging goes along the bottom of the (great) kilt and up the front edge, in The Piper painting. The painter certainly would not have taken the selvedge colour and put it up the front edge of the kilt where it didn't exist. It simply wasn't in the bones painter of that style and quality to invent something like that; it would have gone against his training and the art style of the period.

The Champion's (great) kilt appears to be the same fabric but is bound with edging of a different colour. This, too, is absolutely clear. Were it the selvedge, it would match in both paintings (assuming the cloth is from the same web).

All of which is not to say that a painter of the time who was unfamiliar with the "rules" of tartan design wouldn't struggle at times to accurately record every detail of a particular tartan correctly; the point is that the artist would do his very best to paint what he saw. It couldn't enter his mind to purposely diverge from what was in front of him; such notions didn't exist.

I've spent some time examining the pipes in The Piper painting and it seems obvious to me that the painter was somewhat defeated or confused about the mechanical construction of the wooden parts of the pipes. Interesting, because the painter lavished so much care on the bag! But the style of the time was obsessive about costume detail, so the painter was on home ground concerning the bag, not so much about the wooden parts of the pipes. It could have been a matter of time: perhaps the costume and bag were painted from life, but the pipes were painted after the piper left with them, and were based on the artist's preparatory sketches. The same could be true of The Champion's sword and gun.

In any case I've prepared full-scale sketches of the outward appearance of The Piper's pipes which have been laid over typical modern Highland pipe specs; my intention for decades has been to have this set reproduced. By the way the set appears to be of local hardwood and mounted in grey cowhorn or pewter (pewter mounts are common on old French and Bulgarian bagpipes).

In case one wonders at the odd style of The Piper's pipes, here are early Highland sets that aren't too different