ABSTRACT
I wrote this book to show that the Scottish Enlightenment held special status as an exemplary highpoint for didactic art and that it was a phenomenon of time and place. The very nature of enlightened Scotland—its precision of ideas, language, descriptors, and products—all contributed to the interplay of the beautiful and the good. After all, the Scotland of the early- to mid-nineteenth century did not offer the circumstances for sustaining a philosophy built on parallel streams of aesthetics and morals. In the nineteenth century the themes and subjects cultivated by eighteenth-century painters—landscape, portraiture, genre painting, and history painting—did indeed flourish, and the cult of the Highlands did indeed continue, especially in the literature of Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Certainly bold hints of early Romanticism lay in the enlightenment culture of the passions. But persons of education and wealth looked across borders and seas with a vision that turned away from the eighteenth-century Scottish homeland. They were less concerned with the Scottish nation’s identity as a cultural self but, rather, with its place in the Union, as the organs of economics, politics, education, philosophy, and sociology ripened and adjusted to a modern age. They encouraged global prominence in several strategic areas and thereby celebrated Scotland’s remarkable material progress in world economies. Education became more specialized and compartmentalized, directly focused on improvement and regulation with less attention to the integrating ideals that epitomized the writings of the eighteenth century. Views of Caledonia transformed into an alluring myth: over-glorified, romanticized, and gentrified, in other words, acceptable as British and enticing to a world audience. The artist as a hero now gazed internally; he was more isolated and individualized, less concerned with feelings for his fellow man than with the personal. And of course the aesthetic theory of the imitation of nature became passé as the world of art criticism gazed at Germany.
