Tweed kilts?

[OC Richard]

Thanks for that link! Fascinating.

I do wonder about the contention that the majority of 19th century portraits depicting Highland Dress are of members of the aristocracy "dressed to the nines".

First one must establish what is meant by "portrait".

The Victorian period saw the advent of the enormous popularity of photographic portraits. I've seen many hundreds of those and only a tiny percentage are of aristocrats. Even the ones that are, for example Royal portraits, often show outdoor dress (tweed jackets and hats, small plain sporrans, practical shoes, etc).

Now if we exclude the most popular sort of Victorian portrait, the photograph, and limit ourselves to paintings (which had a calamitous decline in popularity) we might make such an assertion if it wasn't for the fact that the largest corpus of painted Highlander portraits, The Highlanders Of Scotland, has only commoners as its subjects.

I do wonder how many Victorian oil portraits exist of members of the aristocracy in full Evening Highland dress. The number would have to approach sixty to out-do The Highlanders Of Scotland alone.

In any case the Ansdell paintings linked to are what I would call genre paintings. They are of a different nature than oil portraits.

People who hire portrait artists to paint them see the work in progress and have control over it. Having such a painting done was a significant investment in time and money (only within reach of the wealthy) and I would imagine that the sitter would insure that their clothing and accoutrements were depicted accurately.

Genre-painting are a different matter. The figures that inhabit the paintings might be based on sketches done on location, but often are based on models who pose in the artist's studio.

I recall reading that the American Western artist Frederic Remington had quite a collection of clothing and props that he would dress his models in (cowboy outfits, Native American costumes, etc).