 Well, hello everybody and very warm welcome. It's great to have so many people with us this afternoon joining us. I see already there are getting on for 300. So warm welcome to the Paul Mellon Centre and even though we can't see you, you're all very welcome wherever you are, whichever time zone you're in. I'm Martin Post. I'm the Deputy Director for Grants and Publications here at the Paul Mellon Centre that many of you know the centre. We're a centre for studies in British art and as this slide indicates, this is our 50th anniversary or at least it was in 2020. We've been going since 1970. We publish books. We publish research in all sorts of aspects of British art. We have a whole roster of events. Even though, you know, we're like everybody else struggling with the restrictions, we have an extraordinary amount of material online. So if you haven't checked out and I'm sure you have, have a look at the offerings that we've got the centre or journal British Art Studies. So there's plenty there, but so what I'm going to do is just speak very briefly and introduce the session and introduce our speaker. So it's my great privilege and pleasure to introduce today's lecture by Duncan MacMillan, French art and Scottish ideas, the Scottish Enlightenment and the dawn of the modernity in French art. Before I go on any further, you'll see there's a housekeeping slide there and I just want to briefly go through it with you. And just to explain you as it says you'll be automatically muted when you join the webinar and you can communicate verbally. If the host unmutes you, and that can happen during the Q&A. Okay, so if you want to, the talk will last about Duncan's going to talk for about 50 minutes. And then we'll follow it with the Q&A and we'll ask you to invite you to ask questions. You can do this in two ways. You can use the virtual hand raise button. If you want to speak, so little hand and little hand goes up and you can speak verbally or you can put some people prefer this, you can put a question in the Q&A box and we'll be looking at those. So I'll see all the questions that come up and I can read those out on your behalf. And if there's anything that comes up, if you want to make a comment just generally to everybody else and observation, do use the chat box and also if you've got any problems or difficulties. The session is being recorded, but please don't take photographs and inevitably any offensive behavior will not be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host. Okay, so before I introduce and say a little bit more about Duncan, I'd just like to say something about the background to this event. This is part of a collaboration between the Mellon Centre and the Fleming Collection, and this was occasioned by a generous gift to the centre in 2019 of the Fleming Wirefield Library on Scottish Art. The acquisition I'm delighted to report has already been cataloged by our librarian Emma Floyd, and it can be located on the centre's website through the library catalogue. The collection, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, dates back to 1968, when the investment bank, Robert Fleming & Crow, began to acquire Scottish art to hang in his offices all over the world. Following the sale of the bank in 2000, the collection was vested under the guidance of the family in the Fleming Weifold Art Foundation. So the Weifold name was adjoined to commemorate the life of the last Lord Weifold, grandson of Robert Fleming. The Fleming Collection today comprises the finest collection of Scottish art outside public institutions. It comprises over 600 works from the 17th century right through to the present day. It's a hard-working collection, and its purpose is to further an understanding and awareness of Scottish art and creativity through exhibitions, events, publishing and education, with an emphasis placed on initiatives outside Scotland. So the gift of its specialist library to the Paul Mellon Centre forms just one aspect of this mission to promote its long-term museum without walls strategy. And so to today's speaker. To many of you, Duncan McMillan requires no introduction, and Duncan's eminence as the foremost historian of Scottish art is the reason why we have the audience that we have with us today over 300. And for the record, Duncan is emeritus professor in the history of Scottish art, the University of Edinburgh, where he pioneered the teaching of Scottish art as a university subject. As many of you will know, he's an art critic of the Scotsman and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Arts. He's also an honorary Royal Scottish academician. His book, Scottish Art 1460 to 2000, when the Saltire Prize for Scottish Book of the Year, and it's now recognised as a standard work on the subject. Duncan has written numerous articles and exhibition catalogs and his publications include Painting in Scotland, The Golden Age, which I'm sure you all know, Scottish Art in the 20th century, Scotland's Shrine, the Scottish National War Memorial, and several monographs on contemporary artists including Elizabeth Blackadder, Blackadder and Victoria Crow. And he's currently preparing for publication, a book on the place of the Scottish Enlightenment in the early history of modern art. So I think that's all from me. And without further ado, I'm going to let you welcome Duncan to our virtual podium. Over to you, Duncan. Well, thank you very much, Martin. And I will try the technology. Yeah, I wanted to begin with an anecdote from my student days, which is relevant to the subject. I was wandering through France and ended up picking grapes in the summer of 1959. At one evening, passing an idle hour, wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt, I was accosted by two very large policemen dressed in black leather with white helmets, who thought they were going to have some fun with a foreigner. They asked me for my papers in a very threatening way. And I take it back, but I explained who I was. I said I was a student studying philosophy and I came from Scotland. And at which point the mood changed from storm to sunshine. You're Scottish. And you're studying philosophy. A lot beyond. Philosophers don't need papers. It's a great memory, folk memory of the old alliance, the enduring friendship between Scotland and France. Of course, the political need for that friendship went with the act of union and joined action against a common enemy, but I wouldn't say that here. And the relationship did continue, however, and particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries in philosophy. I wrote on the side of the screen here from Francis Michel who wrote a history of the old alliance in which he says this 1862 in France, Scottish philosophy shaped the skepticism of the 18th century and the eclecticism of the 19th century. It was the philosophers of Edinburgh who brought about the spirit for revival in France at the beginning of the 19th century. Well, that's quite an incongium. The art were linked, of course, and the picture on the screen is with Hume, the greatest of our empirical philosophers, painted by Alan Ramsey, who was a close friend. Now Hume belonged to the moral sense school of philosophy, the first empirical school of philosophy in the 18th century, which was formulated by Francis Hutchison. And eventually Thomas Reid wrote his philosophy of common sense. And I'll deal with the moral sense first and then later on we'll move on to common sense. Now the central argument of moral sense was that morality depends on reason, not on reason, but on feeling. David Hume defined it thus. The object, not of reason. It lies in our self, not in the object. In other words, it's subjective, not objective and this of course was the height of the age of reason, but here we have feeling trumping reason. Now, Thomas Reid's philosophy of common sense was published in 1764. Just four years later in French in 1768. It built on moral sense, but its great appeal was that it countered Hume's notorious skepticism. Hume's friend, Adam Smith, was actually a pupil of Francis Hutchison. And so too was the painter Gavin Hamilton. I'll come to him in a moment, but Smith, in his theory of moral sentiments in 1759, argued that because moral sense depends on feeling, it is sympathy, our ability to feel for others that makes society possible at all. And to imagination is the faculty that enables sympathy so society depends on imagination. And to the imagination and to a new mission for artists, the cultivation of the faculty that is key to the proper working of society. Rightly or wrongly, our artists still claim that high calling. But at this moment too, along with imagination, other modern ideas enter the lexical of art expression of feeling through art and admiration for the primitive. It was Thomas Blackwell, who gave us the primitive. Blackwell was professor of Greek and a principal of Marshall College Aberdeen. And in this book, his inquiry into the life and writings of Homer, published in 1735, he argued that where the imagination functions most freely, moral sense will function best. What we see in Homer is the echo of a far off primitive time. And in his words, the folds and windings of the human breast lay open to the eye, nor were people ashamed to avoid passions and inclinations, which are entirely void of art and design. This was, he argued, at the beginning of history, a still innocent social order, dawned from Hobbesian darkness. And he was not yet imprisoned by what William Blake called the mind forged manacles of man, the stultifying rules of the evolved search order. Blackwell was clear, however, that if artists were to capture anything of that primitive fire, they must first shed their modern habits of mind. First business when we set down to prioritize and high strange is to unlearn a daily way of life. We're obliged to adopt a set of more natural manners, which however are foreign to us and must be like plants raised in hotbeds or greenhouses in comparison to those which grow in soils. I don't get, yeah, you'll share your screen again. Yes. Thank you. We live within doors, covered as it were from nature's face and passing our days supine the ignorant of her beauties. Adam Ferguson, friend of Adam Smith wrote following this thought, the artless song of the savage heroic legend of the bar have sometimes a magnificent beauty, which no change of language can improve and no refinement of the critic inform reform. Oh, what's happened? No, I can't change the slide. Want to Duncan try it, stop sharing and sharing again, just see if it reboots. Oh, are we? Oh, and then I can share. Well, you have my. I'll just get your presentation up to share it. Okay. And then I know when to change the slides. Sorry. Once I've put the presentation up just let me know when you like the next slide. Each time. Shall I try again just once more. Yeah. Yeah, let's try again. As it's working. Okay. MacPherson author translator of Ossian was a student of Thomas Blackwell in Aberdeen, and his first Ossianic collection. You see here fragments of ancient poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland was published in 1760. Modeling Ossian on Blackwell's pre-literate Homer MacPherson devised a synthetic poetic language that was the first ever essay in neoprimaturism. In Rome. In the same year. People of Francis Hutchison completed this picture. And don't keep away the death of Hector. It was the first of six paintings from the Iliad. This is one of a set of small versions you made to show his clients. The large version is one of two surviving full size pictures that do survive. And it is nine feet by 13 feet. It's enormous. Hamilton's plan was to publish his pictures as a series of prints in the form of her got through X progress, but only five were ever completed. As a series. We write the Iliad as a tragic collision between the brutal warrior courage of Achilles and the tender domestic love of Hector and Andromache. You can see here Achilles dragging Hector around the walls of Troy contrasted with the. This was indeed a crisis of moral sense, but Hamilton had a problem to capture the grandeur of what Blackwell called the ancient manners. He learned what he knew and find a visual equivalent to the primitive language that McPherson had devised for option. The Raphael cartoons at Hampton Court gave him a sense of scale. You also looked at Michelangelo. You can see the figure. It could be an simple simple was repeated there. But most intriguingly Hamilton also turned to the Italian primitives the artists of the earlier in essence unfashionable and completely remote from the prevailing baroque. You look at his Andromache morning Hector aside jotters lamentation in Padua, you see the connection perhaps. Overall what he created was a stylistic mix, but it was quite unlike anything else in the 18th century and Melchior Missarini, who was connoisseur and photographer. It's quite clear but it's important. Around the middle of the last century he wrote that is the 18th century through Gavino painting was restored. Recommended the uncanova look at Nicola Pizzano and the artists of the Quattrocento and indeed he did if you compare his three graces with Botticelli you can see the close connection. But Hamilton himself also looked at Nicola Pizzano in prime needing before Achilles from the Achilles at the Iliad series you see here. The figure of prime below is clearly modeled on one of the three wise men in Nicola Pizzano's pulpit in Siena. Hampton was the doyen of an international circle of younger artists in Rome. Here is two examples. James Barry and Alexander Runciman, both on the right both clearly echoing figures from Nicola Pizzano's 13th century pulpit in Pisa on the left. And if Hamilton's Iliad pictures were shaped by moral sense he also developed this further in two paintings which both have women as their protagonists. The death of Lucretia on the left and Agrippina with the actress and Germanicus. Lucretia kills herself after her rape by one of the Tarquins, the Royal House of Rome. He was her guest so his brutal crime also violated the law. With her suicide Lucretia challenged the men to avenge this outrage fired by her courage. Brutus swears vengeance leads a rebellion the Tarquins were overthrown and the Republic established but it all followed the action of a woman. Then centuries later, when the empire had replaced the Republic, Agrippina picked up the torch to challenge the new tyranny, carrying the ashes of her murdered husband Germanicus to Rome. She mutually accused the second emperor, Tiberius of his murder. In both pictures women stand heroically for love and loyalty against tyranny and oppression. Hamilton kept an open studio, indeed he was an extremely nice man I think. And among the many artists he inspired that most famous is J.L. David. David's dromical morning hectare on the left is just one of the Bumeric pictures he painted in Rome, following Hamilton's example. The key picture David's early career however, is the oath of the Horatiae. The link with Lucretia is obvious when you put them side by side. However David's picture is usually seen as masculine heroics heralding the revolution, but a contemporary critic commented on the cruelty of the subject. And indeed the point of the painting is not the resolve of the men, but their stark brutality. The sister Camilla, on the left, on the right rather, the brothers Horatiae are swearing to kill the Karatee and then murder their own sister. It's a savage honor killing. The men are certainly warriors and the women are collapsed in despair, but they are the future. Feeding sensibility, moral sense in fact, has to prevail with societies to move on from such brutality. David's picture follows Hamilton very closely in subject as well as in composition. 15 years later, however, in the intervention of the Serbian women, David took up directly Hamilton's theme of heroic women, champions of peaceful virtues. The first Romans, the Serbian men, came back to get them, but Hercilia, the center there, the leader of the Serbian women placed herself between the opposing sides to bring peace and reconciliation. In 1795, when he conceived the picture, David himself was in prison, reconciliation was much on his mind. The Scottish thought was also still very current. In 1798, the year before David completed his painting, the philosopher Sophie de Grouchy published a new translation of Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiment with the digital essay on sympathy. And David were in different camps politically, but she too had been imprisoned and her husband Nicholas and an advocate of gender equality had died in prison. As an intervention by a woman, de Grouchy spoke exactly parallel to the plea of Hercilia for reconciliation between the Romans and the Sabines. It did so too in the name of moral sense. Etienne Jean de la Clouse, one of David's students, wrote a life of his teacher and he describes him at just this moment, consciously turning away from the models, back to archaic sculpture and the painting of Giotto, Frangelo and Perugino, the Italian primitives again, in fact, David even criticized his own both of the ratio as too anatomical. He was clearly revisiting what he learned from Hamilton in Rome. Fired by these ideas, one of David's students, Maurice K, led a group of young firebrands actually nicknamed Les Primitifs. They're also called Les Bargues because of their Farouche appearance. For them, Ossian Homer and the Bible were the only acceptable texts. They were mocked too for turning to inspiration to art before Raphael. Little work actually by them survives, but Port de Collère's Ossian singing, you see here, reflects their ideas. The eventual art historians have dismissed the hint that David admired this picture, but Duquilla follows his preference pretty closely. It's pretty austere, flat and very formal. Ang's painting, which is contemporary or nearly contemporary, the Ambassadors of Agamemnon, Achilles of the Ambassadors of Agamemnon, is very similar. It is also both in subject and in composition, as you can see, very like Hamilton's composition, painting and engraving rather of the anger of Achilles. Napoleon was an enthusiast for Ossian. Ang's dream of Ossian in 2013 is only the most famous result. But there are many other Ossianic, they must leave that to move on. Philosophy dominated Scottish culture. Witness these two monuments above Princess Street, Hume's tomb, there by Robert Adam, below, and Google Stuart's monument above. And when did a professor of philosophy ever get such a monument? A pupil and principal of Thomas Reid, Stuart also had close personal connections with the philosophers in France, both before and after the Revolution. There's Google Stuart on the right and Thomas Reid on the left. Now Hume's intellectual skepticism hinted on his conviction that if the mind can only know ideas, that is its own activity, then we cannot certainly know anything beyond ourselves. We count to this arguing that our knowledge of the world is intuitive and direct, not intellectual. Ideas do not intervene. Perception is an act of the mind in response to the separate physical stimuli of sensation. The mind can know the world beyond itself because through our physiology, it interacts with it. So it is a mystery, however, I quote. There is a deep dark gulf fix between them, between our mind and our physiology, which our understanding cannot pass. And the manner of their correspondence is, at intercourse, is absolutely unknown. Reid became a professor in Aberdeen and then in Glasgow, but he began as a student in Marshall College in Aberdeen under Thomas Blackwell, but also George Turnbull. Turnbull's treatise on ancient painting published in 1740 was the first accessible history of classical painting. Turnbull also championed the importance and value of painting itself. Notably, too, he went on to be tutor to Horace Walpole, the first historian of English art. Reid clearly had a tutor with a highly developed interest in art, and what makes him so interesting is the way he used art in his philosophy. The crucial distinction that Reid makes is between sensation, which is physical, the signs, and perception, which is mental, the signified. In our ordinary lives, we ignore the signs, the sensations on our retina. We only know the signified, the perceptions we derive from them. Artists are different, however, and this is a crucial point that Reid returns to frequently. Only they need to understand and observe the signs. Here's a quote from Reid. I cannot therefore entertain the hope of being intelligible to readers who have not by practice acquired the habit of distinguishing the appearance of things from the judgment that we form of their color, distance, magnitude, and figure. The only profession in life where it's necessary to make that distinction is painting. The painter had occasion for an abstraction with regard to visible objects, and this indeed is the most difficult part of his art. For it is evident if he could fix the visible appearance of objects without confounding it with the things signified by that appearance, it would be as easy for him to paint from the life as it is to paint from a copy. Rayburn was a close friend of Louis Stuart who expounded Reid's theory of perception in his lectures, and in his elements of the philosophy of human mind published in 1792, or from 1792, and in French in 1808. Reid's ideas are clearly reflected in Rayburn's painting. In the detail from the double portrait of the clocks of panic on the left, you can see how he's putting down patches of light and shadow without the frame given by prior knowledge. Later, in the portrait of Lord Newton on the right, his style has become even more radically abbreviated. For Reid, expression, facial expression, body language, etc., is parallel to perception but in reverse. He acts on the body through its physiology to manifest itself in a set of signs. We read them intuitively. Again, only artists need observe and record these signs, or indeed only they are capable of observing them. Certainly both perception and expression are reflected in Rayburn's work, and this marvelous painting of Bailey William Galloway is obviously a superb study of expression, something that Rayburn passed on to his young friend David Wilkie. Reid's idea of art is surely radical. If artists only put down the signs, the incoherent sensations received on the retina, not the coherent perceptions they derive from them, then we read painting as we read the physical world, intuitively and indeed subjectively. Ideas have no part in it. We reconstruct the artist's perceptions from his or her record of their sensations. If that sounds like a recipe for impressionism, then perhaps it was, but then I'll come to that. Reid also argued over that expression as in being expressive is an essential part of art. Artificial signs signify, but they do not express, he wrote, they speak to the understanding as algebraical characters may do, but the passions, the affections and the will hear them not. These continue dormant and inactive to speak to them in the language of nature, to which they are all attention and obedience. It were easy to show that the fine arts are natural so far as they're expressive and are nothing else but the language of nature which we brought into the world with us that have unlearned by disuse and so find the greatest difficulty in recovering. Reid echoes Blackwell precisely. We must unlearn what we have learned, be childlike in fact. When Raven painted Neil Gao here, the most celebrated fiddle player of his day, he summarised Reid's whole argument, perception, expression and art as the language of nature. Gao played by ear intuitively. He'd not learned formally, so he did not need to unlearn. Raven plainly suggests to an analogy between his own expressive brush and the Fiddler's bow. He was a student in Edinburgh when Dougal Stuart was at the height of his fame. In the blind Fiddler, you see here, from 1806, he shows us both sides of Reid's theory of expression. A brilliant account of facial expression and body language, the picture also epitomises the expressive language of nature in the music of the untort Fiddler and the children's intense response and just to bridge the gap there. Wilkie also tax a child's drawing to the door of the kitchen cupboard, linking the oral and the visual. In Edinburgh, Wilkie's friend, surgeon Charles Bell, set out to meet the challenge laid down by Reid and illuminate the deep dark gulf between the body's physical sensations and the mind's cognition and vice versa, how the mind acts on the body in expression. So if Scottish surgeons don't draw, then Bell studied with the artist David Allen, but he was also a student of Dougal Stuart. Eventually, he identified the nature and working of the nervous system as the bridge that gap between the physiology of the body and the mind. But in his research, he started expression and in 1806 published his anatomy of expression for artists. He provided at least one illustration to Bell's book, which you see in the middle there and the detail of the British politicians by Wilkie on the right. Bell also assisted elder brother John in a book of anatomy illustrated with starkly gruesome etchings you see on the right here. One of them is plainly the model for one of Jericho's apparently most heroic paintings. Bell was known in France, he was a hero indeed, after he came to the aid of the French wounded lying untended after the Battle of Waterloo. His anatomy expression was popular in Jericho's circle. Clearly, and this shocking image also seems to echo a comment that he made about depictions of death, you see the quote below there. You see that too often a painter is apt to take his ideas of death from the stage, but it is scarcely possible that from such a source you can derive the materials of a natural simple or terrific representation. Jericho's wrath for the medusa also seems to me the central challenge Bell laid down for artists. It is only when the enthusiasm of an artist is stronger after counteract his repugnance to scenes in themselves harsh and unpleasant, that he is careful to seek all occasions of storing his mind with images of human passion and suffering that he can truly deserve the name of a painter. I should otherwise be inclined to class him with those physicians who being educated to a profession the most interesting turn aside to grasp emoluments by Gaudier accomplishments rather than by the severe and unpleasant prosecution of science. It's a wonderful phrase isn't it. Here are the finished painting with illustrations from Bell's book you see there are two clear rotations. After Jericho's untimely death in 1724. Sheva top left of the detail took the unusual step of painting of death with portrait in it Jericho's head seems to echo Bell's illustration of death that you see below. What's on the screen is another literally posthumous painting of Jericho attributed to Alexander Corriard I've rotated it but actually, if you think about it Corriard must rotate it because he painted him. From the corpse lying on his side. The picture below on the right by only shot my time it's also also been identified as a death bed portrait of Jericho, but if it is his beard has been shaped and I think it's really just bells illustration in paint. This grizzly thrice repeated image is surely testimony to the topicality of Bell's book in Jericho's circle. Jericho visited London in 1820 and spent most of 1821 again in the city. In 1821, he was a guest that they are a dinner will key was one of the hosts, and a few days beforehand Jericho visited his studio. The Chelsea pensioners was on will keys easel. And in the letter of the first of May 1821 Jericho recorded his profound admiration for the picture saying. I shall mention to you only the one figure that seemed the most perfect to me at his post and expression bring tears to the eye, however one might resist. It is the wife of a soldier says she is. Who thinking only of her husband scans the list of the dead with an unquiet haggard eye. Jericho's art changed radically out to this. Portraits of patients in the insane asylum. That's all. Yeah. For instance, we're done but in 1821 21 and his death in 1824. There are two of them here. So I'll show you the picture in a moment. Jericho's portraits of patients were either painted for or given as a gift to Egypt oxy doctor in the asylum and a childhood friend of the artist. And as of studies of expression as you can see that clearly follow will keep. But they also reflect the impact of race philosophy in another way. His theory of intuition implied the physiology of mind. And so logically the possibility of mental disease. The beginnings of psychiatry followed. And in France. The Esquirole was a pioneer of this new science of psychiatry. George. Esquirole used to the enemy to classify mental diseases. However, Alexander Morrison just on psychiatry in Edinburgh in 1823 noted how for Esquirole, rather like the phrenologists reading the configuration of the skull. So it seems that the fixed physiognomy of his patients have mattered. Jericho's portraits don't look fixed at all. And Bell argued, conversely, that expression can only be captured in motion. George followed him to remark on the inconstancy of expression in his patients. So it seems. So it seems to me that it was Bell, not Esquirole, as Jericho followed Wilkie. Now this implicit dialogue links read Stuart Bell, Wilkie, Jericho, George and the origins of psychiatry. It's just a hint of the complexity of the exchanges that I'm trying to summarize here. Here is. And there's certainly a striking analogy between Wilkie's command of expression and Jericho's portraits. But 40 years ago, I showed this portrait at the exhibition. It was quite unknown at the time. And my colleagues all explained when I saw it, how French. Well, maybe it was Jericho who was being Scottish. During these years, Reed's philosophy became very topical in France. The philosopher, P.P. Roy Collard, lectured on Reed at the Sorbonne from 1811 to 1814, concentrating on perception. His teaching was interrupted by the restoration, but his assistant, Victor Cousin, carried on. He enlarged the topic to cover Scottish philosophy more generally. His lectures were published as, like philosophy, like Cousins, you see here. This however, 1957, is the third edition. There was a fourth edition, and I think it might even have been a fifth. It doesn't look like a bestseller. So I suspect it became a textbook. Theodore J. Roy, pupil of Cousin, said, what Roy Collard began, Cousin completed. The reconstruction of French thought on Scottish common sense principles. It was said, D. Roy, quite simply, une naissance. It was a birth. The painters took notice, too. In November 1818, Delacroix wrote to his friend J.B. Pérez. I should be very glad, too, if we could once again attend the opening of Cousin's course. In 1821, however, Cousin's teaching was interrupted by politics. In 1828, it was resumed to great acclaim. But meanwhile, Delacroix remained in touch with him. And indeed, years later, in 1855, he noted, when I left college, I too wanted to know everything. I thought I was becoming a philosopher with Cousin. But back in May 1823, he wrote in his journal, I decided to paint scenes from the massacre at Skien. I go to see Cousin tomorrow. Delacroix's choice of a shocking massacre of Greeks by Turks reflected contemporary support for the Greek War of Independence. Like the Raft of the Medusa, it also met Bell's exhortation not to flinch from gruesome subjects. The picture is most celebrated, however, for its aerial perspective. This was new in French art. However, anticipated in Thomas Reed's remarkable and extended analysis of very perspective, illustrating his discussion of perception with Cousin that day. There is that I'm not painters or critics of painting cannot easily be persuaded that the color of the same object had a different appearance at the distance of one foot and of 10 in the shade and in the light. The masters in painting know how by the degradation of color and the fusion of the minute parts figures which are upon the same canvas at the same distance from the eye may be made to represent objects which are at the most unequal distances. They know how to make objects appear to be of the same color by making their appearance really of different colors. There's more of that kind of mock or discussion in the read. He himself also echoed Reed on perception very closely when he wrote, even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs a picture. We do not see the blades of grass in a landscape, no one who blemishes the skin of a charming face. The mind itself has a special task to perform without our knowledge. It does not take into account all that the eye offers. Delacroix picture was in a salon in 1824. He saw Constable Haywayne on the right here, also hanging there. He took his home picture back to rework it. His determination to paint a picture in which every perspective featured so significantly perhaps reflected his conversation with Cousin. But working for a text, he got it wrong. Constable's picture showed him how to do it. But what to what extent had Constable himself also been influenced by Reed and Dubois Stewart. I cannot explore it further here, but Constable and Wilkie were close friends. They painted out of doors together. An aerial perspective was for Wilkie the key to his painting of the Chelsea pensioners. One of the limitations to Wilkie's success was meteoric, while Constable lingered in obscurity. The Scott was clearly the leader in their friendship. During these years, Walter Scott was also a passion in France. His vision of history seemed to fit French sensibility after the traumas of the previous decades. Roger Roy thought the French were better equipped, even though the Scott's own compatriots to appreciate him. In the salon, so 1824 and 1827, there was a gap, there wasn't a salon in between those two dates. There were numerous paintings inspired by Scott. Horace Bernays, Alan McCauley from the Legend of Montrose is just one example. Ray Bern, whose work was engraved, showed a clear model of Iron Chieftain. There are also books about Scott, however. In 1821, Charles Naudier published Promenade de Dieppe, Montagne de Cosse. Naudier was early associated with the primitif. And his book describes an oceanic pilgrimage he made in 1819. He was thrilled to see what he thought with the Iron Chieftains in the streets of Edinburgh, this is an illustration there of his largely imaginary Iron Chieftain, I think. He climbed Ben Lomond and saw a fingle behind every rock. And he was positively ecstatic when a knowing Barefoot Iron Lassie wrote him a cross-locked catrin singing a Gallic song. I hope she got a good tip. In 1825, too, Amélie Pichot published Voyage historique ébiteraire en Angleterre et à l'Écosse, essentially a pilgrimage to Edinburgh to meet Walter Scott, but also a rather detailed commentary on contemporary English and Scottish art and letters. Pichot translated both Scott and Byron, in fact he was the first to do so, but was also Charles Bell's first biographer. In the same cellar, 1824, there were also paintings of Hollywood and of Rothstein Chapel by Louis Daguerre. Both related to dioramas currently on view in Paris. Scotland was high fashion, when in 1828 Crusad resumed his lectures. Henry Bulzak was clearly party to the conversations they inspired among the painters, and he teased them in his loftiest in 1831, a story much loved by both Cezanne and Picasso. In the story, the great-mate Frenhofer has worked for years on a mysterious masterpiece no one has seen. He agrees eventually to show it to the young Poussin and his friend Porbus. On condition that Poussin is good for a mistress, Gillette will pose naked for him. Frenhofer then shows them his picture, and I quote, Aha! cried Frenhofer. You did not expect to see such perfection. You're looking for a picture and you see a woman before you. There's such depth in that canvas. The atmosphere is so true that you cannot distinguish it from the air that surrounds us. Where is art? Art has vanished. It is invisible. It is the form of a living girl that you see before you. Is there not the effect produced there like that, which all natural objects present in the atmosphere about them? For seven years I studied and watched how the data for blends with the objects on which it falls. Do you see anything, Poussin asked Porbus. No. Do you? I see nothing. I can see nothing there but confused masses of color and a multitude of fantastical lines that go to make a dead wall of paint. The old man deep in his musing smiled at the woman he alone beheld and did not hear. But sooner or later he'll find out that there's nothing there, right, Poussin? There's nothing there. It might seem a fair response to a painting where the painter has recorded only his or her sensations, not their perceptions, and when it cruises words, sensation in no way resembles its object. In 1825 Delacroix and Bonneton both spent the summer months in London. Delacroix visited Wilkie's studio and it wasn't just a social call. He made a highly finished copy of a Ruben sketch that Wilkie owned that must have taken several days. Bonneton evidently joined him too. And the sketch for Nox putting forward the Lords of Confliction at St Andrews was on Wilkie's easel. Both French artists also saw the Chelsea pensioners which was exhibited at the British Institution that summer. Although it was not completed until 1832, in his Nox, Wilkie pioneered a new kind of history much in tune with Scott's Waverly novels. The original expressions are those of real people, not the formal gestures or actors in some rhetorical drama. It reflected what Charles Nody identified as distinctive in Scott, his account of Le Cote Real de l'Humanité, the real side of humanity. Back in Paris, Delacroix and Bonneton share the studio and both worked variations on the expressive figure of Wilkie's Nox. You see Bonneton there, with John Quixote, there with the Antigree, Walter Scott of course. Delacroix, the first emphatistophanies, then a detail from Wilkie's picture at the top. Delacroix's murder of the Bishop of Leage from Scott's novel Quentin Derwood, which a novel they loved because it was set in medieval France. Also, are we okay? Hi Duncan, sorry your connection dropped, so yeah, if you could share your screen again, that would be great. Seems to work. Right, this is Wilkie on the left and Delacroix on the right of course. Delacroix recorded how at that time Bonneton was deeply troubled about the need to paint bigger, more serious paintings. Quentin Derwood Leage on the left here was the result of his ambitious picture. In it, Bonneton quotes a group in Wilkie's painting, the British Festival, on the right there, that personified Wilkie's own very similar dilemma a few years earlier. Should he be a comic painter, as his audience wished him to be, or follow his inclination to be more serious? Even more in France than in Britain, it was universally accepted the time that only history painting really counted. Big events treated in grand generalizations. Everything else was inferior. Sorry, Bonneton faced this problem as Wilkie had done, but Wilkie had also disposed of it conclusively in the Chelsea pensioners. An old soldier is reading a spatch of the news of the victory of Waterloo to an excited crowd. Wilkie gives the date 22nd of June. Waterloo was beyond question history, but it happened on the 18th of June, four days earlier and hundreds of miles away. Wilkie shows us history is not a series of grand events. It's just a mass of individual responses. Indeed, with delightful irony, it's just an old man reading a newspaper. Everything in nature is individuals at home. And instead of the generalization of academic history painting, Wilkie's picture is set at a precise moment in time. The position of the sun, hence the importance of the air perspective. In a particular place, and it consists of nothing but individuals each distinct. The picture was also a huge success. It is derailed to protect it from the crowds of the Academy. And Wilkie charged the duty of what Wellington 1200 guineas more than ever been paid to a living artist. He's thrown by popular claim history painting never recovered. Not least in France, although Wilkie himself embarked straight away on a new kind of history painting with nox preaching St Andrews of which more in a moment. In the shot glass department. The hero goes through the battle of Waterloo. There's no idea quite what has happened. He's imprisoned in a tower with nothing to read the water Scott woman. In Bonnington's Quentin Doe would at liège. His hero is just like stormed off her breeze. He looks like a knight in shining armor he's wearing shining armor, a proper historical hero but in fact, he hasn't a clue what's going on. Wandering into the city of liège he was recognized as one of the king's guard echo says people thought he'd come from the king promising assistance, but it was just the other accident. So much for generalization history has no ground design it is casual chaotic even like the anarchic crowd surrounding the young Scott. Wilkie's small masterpiece. The letter introduction is likewise a picture of ill matched expectations. But the personal even autobiographical element in it was new and radical. It's a picture about oneself. The young man armed with a letter of introduction gets a frosty reception. This is Wilkie's own experience when he arrived in London. But the pictures also metaphor for the tension between his Scottish intellectual inheritance and his success in London as a painter of comedy. In the painting, the dog can smell the young man is fresh from the country, but he's ill at ease. He doesn't know what to do with his new hat and gloves. This picture always reminds me of my father actually because he was a country boy, his father like bookies father was an ordained minister of the Kirk. He went up to Oxford, long ago at the beginning of the last century and he said the only advice his tutor gave him was if you ever go to town you must always wear a hat. My father never wore a hat from that day off thereafter, but you can see poor boy here is struggling with his hat. Suspicious old man is wearing indoor clothes. The windows, no doors. Boy's healthy fresh face, but the old man personifies Thomas Blackwell's complaint. We live within doors covered from teeth. Wilkie's actual test text was probably the paraphrase of Blackwell written by Robert Ferguson in his poem Hame Content. In Ferguson's word summarizing Blackwell and Scots, he says, the old man is sticky for nature's beauties are that daily on his presence call. The personal and autobiographical are perhaps surprisingly also part of Wilkie's painting of Knox preaching us and Andrews. In 1559. Knox defied the threat of death to preach in the cathedral at St Andrews, and by his courage secured the reformation. Before he chose this subject will see will be first thought of painting the murder of Archbishop sharp that took place. Only a few miles from his home in five on the road to St Andrews, a bloody assassination so close, I would have surely have impressed an imaginative boy. choosing instead got his religious history. An event that happened in St Andrews only a few miles further on, he was still exploring his boyhood associations. St Andrews has changed but I was a boy that long ago, and Knox's spirit still loomed large over the city. How much more must have done for the young Wilkie. For this painting. This is the sketch by the way they finished painting is very bit humanist, and it's notate. The sketch is much easier to read. Let's say Wilkie studied Knox is pulpit instance so it is called his chapel. There to I can perhaps shares associations. As a reluctant child, I had to sit under that very same pulpit for long and loaded presbyterian sermons. Maybe Wilkie did too. Certainly the genesis of his picture is closely associated with his boyhood. And though they are so different shares that common ground with Constance was Hey, Wayne, the picture whose associations with the artist boyhood are celebrated. There's a text here to I can't enlarge it, but Archwell Allison essay on taste put for the argument for association that what is beautiful is what is associated personally with us. And Allison needed to say was people Thomas Reed, and a close friend of Dewey Stewart, and I think Constable leans heavily on Allison. And two more pictures informed by boyhood associations grace for meat on the right and the cottage Saturday night. These pictures like Knox preaching and his unfinished painting of Knox administering the sacrament reflect Wilkie's engagement with a looming crisis in the Scottish Kirk. His pictures like these with the Scottish dimension were rather different from his work as a very successful like a dimension in London. This is a self explanatory, the cottage Saturday night illustrates burns poem of the same name describing Bible reading customary in Scottish homes, the night before the Sabbath. Will case father minister, these rituals, part of everyday life in a man's would have been potent memories of the artist boyhood. In the cottage Saturday night to the good man the head of the house reading a great family Bible is will case brother Thomas. And indeed beyond his work was well known through engravings. And this obvious similarity between Corbett's up immediate on and the cottage Saturday night, the figures correspond closely. Crucially, Corbett to represent his own familiar world. His father, Regis Corbett is dosing on the left. The others are personal friends, personal friends, including. The move quite reflection is the same in both pictures. His focus is the figure to the right. Wilkie's book his picture is also musical. Some singing was customary in family prayers. Burns describes how the family chart that artist notes in simple guys they tune their hearts. By father no best aim, their artist notes, music that lacks sophistication, but gains expressive force burns that because black will read at Adam Ferguson. And Burns complete purchase published in France in 1843. In an up immediate on on Corbett challenged high art with a personal local and pointed in honor metropolitan iconography, but will key had preceded him. Cutters Saturday night had already raised this new kind of painting to the level of high art. There is aesthetic continuity to the fiddle stands for the informality of popular culture and its place in ordinary life. You can't see it in this reproduction, but there was actually a fiddle hanging on the wall in the cottage Saturday night. There's aesthetic continuity to the fiddle. Sorry. Just as Raymond had done in his portfolio go Kobe suggests art should be as informal and intuitive as fiddle playing. A child simplicity of response was a model for this new aesthetic and children enthralled by music appear frequently in Wilkie's painting. The little boy. Blazing admiringly that the artist and Kobe huge self portrait is another of the same. Indeed, he is almost a quote from Wilkie's painting the Jews harp picture of the simplest possible musical instrument. Giving pleasure to children that you see the whole of the Jews harp and detail of Corbett's painting. Corbett's claim to be untaught was part of this. There was nothing for him to unlearn if he'd never been taught the scale of his picture with popular culture in direct competition with a high culture of history painting. That is what Wilkie had already done with the Chelsea pensioners. So far, I have suggested that four of the great sign person for the modernity that was over the ratio. Jericho's route to the Medusa, Delacroix, Massacre, Kiosk and Corbett's après-midi all have significant Scottish links. The story doesn't end there, however, because these ideas. They reflect moved into the mainstream. In 1842, Victor Cousin published a new syllabus for the reform by Caloria. The new syllabus of compulsory philosophy. And if philosophy had not still been capacity at St Andrew's 60 years ago, I probably wouldn't be giving this talk. The new syllabus. Cousin's compulsory philosophy was on the Scottish model. The new syllabus includes at the bottom there, the entire works of Thomas Reed. And likewise, in addition of Stuart's elements, the principal commentary on Reed was produced. These were produced over the next few years. These were school books. This is perhaps also explains the multiple editions of Cousin's philosophy. It was part of the syllabus. Reed's idea of how painting works passed into the language of art. There's an affinity between Manet on the right and Rayburn on the left because they were responding to the same ideas. And then there's Leo d'Odore, an early champion of impressionists. Here he is painted by Manet. Wrote about Manet. You see it there on the screen. He saw the world in a brilliance of light to which other eyes were blind. He turns fixed on canvas the sensations which flashed upon his eye. The process was an unconscious one. Since what he saw depended upon his physical organism. Surely that echoes Reed. So you look at Manet too in the 1870s with flat patches of color. What d'Odore again calls les simpletages laid down without defining contrast to explain what you're seeing. Baffled contemporary viewers as Prusa and Porbus were battled by Frenhofer. But again, they match Reed precisely. Look at neo-impressionism too. This is a detail of a quantilist painting by Henri Cross, a painter much admired by Félix Fenillon, the champion of neo-impressionism. These marks cannot really be described as representing anything other than the raw sensations on the eye from which our perceptions derive. That is exactly how Fenillon himself describes quantilism. These painters analyze their visual sensation and fix on their canvas disconnected elements. These multicolored marks coalesce to form an optical mixture which reconstitutes in the retina of the spectator, the artist's initial sensation. Restitue à la rétine la sensation initial. The spectator reconstructs in the artist's perceptions from their account of the incoherent sensations on which those perceptions are based. There's a whole of that picture, such a beautiful one, I couldn't not show it all to you. And you can see here too how Fenillon contrasts the transitory nature of impressionism with a neo-impressionist's attempt to describe nature in her permanent character. To establish, in fact, our sense of the permanent from the transience of sensation, but remaining faithful to that sensation, without generalizing or imposing ideas on it. Fenillon also called neo-impressionism set philosophy visuelle. And finally, what about Cézanne? A few painters took their back, I suspect, and put that to the ECNX. Until the library's open again, I can't be sure if the syllabus had changed. Nevertheless, it's perfectly possible that Cézanne actually studied Thomas Reid. Certainly, you could describe what he does as a marvelous reconciliation of the shifting nature of our actual vision with our sense of the stability and continuity of the world around us. And Reid wrote, The visible appearance of things in my room varies almost every hour, according as the day is clear or cloudy, as the sun is in the east or south or west and as my eye is in one part of the room or another. A chair appears differently to the eye from different distances and seen at different angles, yet we think of it as still the same. And overlooking the varying appearance, we immediately can see the real shape, distance and orientation of the body, which is visible or perspective appearance to the sign and indication. So, I'll end as I began with David Hume. His eyes, in fact. Whatever you may think of the details of my art and perception, sight and the eye are at the center of any empirical epistemics, and they are also the business of artists. To be complete, any account with history of Western art has to include the relationship of art with empirical thought. The two most influential empirical philosophers with David Hume and Thomas Reid. The two most closely associated with them were like them, Scots, Ramsey Hume, Kevin Hamilton, Adam Smith and Francis Hutchison, Rayburn, Wilkie and Dougal Stewart. They are bound to be of interest. Hamilton and Wilkie also both international standing and influence to not least in France. There's a broader question here. What are the heart of empiricism that Hume identified? It is absurd to imagine we can ever distinguish between ourselves and external objects. That is for another day, but it links Hume to Rembrandt in the 17th century in Dutch painting and to Cezanne in the 19th. Dutch painting and Dutch medicine are already deeply engaged with empirical thought in the 17th century. Scotland and Holland were very close. It was in Scotland that these ideas evolved further in art, in philosophy and indeed in medicine. They were then transmitted to the wider world, but especially to France, perhaps because as that policeman bore witness 60 years ago, there is an ancient friendship between Scotland and France, an old alliance. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed Duncan. Sorry, I'm just trying to start my, get myself back again. Thank you so much. That was brilliant. Such breadth and complexity. Very complex for now. Yeah, but taking us all the way through from Gavin Hamilton through to Cezanne. It's a very dense subject. And it's a one that you I think very elegantly managed to unpack for us. I mean, there are so many ideas and I'm going to start though actually with, because we do have one question in the Q&A and I think it's one that you can answer very straightforwardly. And this question is very specific and I think you have an answer to hand. Is there any documentary evidence for Gavin Hamilton having looked at the work of Giotto and other early Italian artists? He went to Padua. It's pretty clear he went to Padua because he went to Venice and then back from Venice on his way back to Britain. And you can't leave Venice to going westward without going through Padua. Hamilton had enormous knowledge of Italian art. He traveled around a lot. And this was on his way back in 1750 back to London that he went to Padua. So I mean, it's not documentary evidence, but it's circumstantial evidence. And he was clearly very interested in, well, his interest in Nicola Pisano, which is, you know, he said of Pisano, he said that he brought about Italian, a marvellous renewal of art. Now there's a remarkable perceptive thing to say about Pisano at that time, middle of the 18th century. And I think I write and say, Duncan, you've written something on that in the film and collection, haven't you, about Hamilton and Yes, there's another piece about Hamilton in the Scottish Art News. Which you can follow up on. And as we say, there's the Q&A function. You can type a question in there if you have one. On any aspect, it can be very particular or very general. I just want to, I was fascinated because Thomas Reed, and I confess my ignorance, is more of a name to me than anything else. And I think that even though I've worked in the mainstream of 18th century British art is someone who's mentioned in passing, but you've brought him right into the centre of the argument and the dialogue. And I know Johnson, of course, was familiar with Reed and knew his work. But I wonder how many English artists were aware of Reed in terms of the influence of his philosophy of his ideas of philosophy of common sense, because in a sense it runs rather counter to the Reynoldsian discourse that developed in the Royal Academy, especially following the period of the discourses and that increasing tension between personified, for example, in the relationship between William Hunter and Joshua Reynolds, in particular, and the general. So where does Reed Well, first of all, I think Wilkie exemplifies that tension because there are two sides to Wilkie. There's the successful academician producing Reynolds style paintings. And there are these really rather radical Scottish paintings that he was producing at the same time for, maybe showed them in the Academy, but clearly he was thinking as a Scott. And I think he, that tension is real, I don't think that the, or he was conscious, I think that the Scottish empirical tradition to which he was part had any recognition in England, except, and this is what you say first name, Constable's Wilkie's friendship with Constable, because as you explore it, I mentioned Archibald Allison is quite clear. I mean, the whole thing about Allison talks about how landscape is an act of worship. You know, we see the creator in our landscape with Constable more or less says that, but not just Constable Ruskin. Ruskin we know read Allison. And of course Ruskin's father was a pupil of Alexander Naismith, who was a close friend of Ravens. And so there's a link into English 19th century through Ruskin, but also and Constable of course was so much an outsider, wasn't he in England? I mean, he, but he did have quite a strong falling in Scotland. That you can trace through for quite clearly from Constable through to MacTucket in Scotland, but nothing like that in England. So there's a sort of, there is a bifurcation here. And Wilkie lives through it, which is because, I mean, it may have been contributed to his nervous breakdown, but he had to, but there's sheer tension. One of the fascinating example of this was Wilkie painted rather charming little portrait of Walter Scott and his family as a farmer and, you know, and this was absolutely sort of an object of disgust in England. How could he possibly be a farmer, which of course has gotten was the tradition. I mean, you know, burns the plowman. So by Scott was really to rather taken about by this. So was Wilkie. It was tricky. And the whole notion of, which of course is so much of burns of serious comedy. No, of being funny seriously. Well, Wilkie couldn't get that across. He had to be seen as really comic, whereas in fact some of his apparently comic pictures are very serious in the Rendez, for instance. There's a wonderful detail in the Rendez where one of the butlers is training to open a bottle of wine corkscrew. He's actually a child of the table beside him. There is the first carry on screwing corkscrew, which he's ignoring, which is progress details like that. Yeah, thank you. We've got some questions here, which I will attend to now. And I'll just read them out in the order we've got them in the first ones from Hugh Buchanan and Hugh asks, did Corbett and Wilkie ever meet? No, no. Corbett didn't come to Paris to your couple years after Wilkie died in fact. I think he was three, I think. So, but on the other hand, I think, as I said in the piece I wrote again, not piece of question, not news that Wilkie's reputation in France was enormous. You know, he was made a corresponding member of the Institute of France. The painters gave him dinners and from very early on his first trip to Paris to France in 1819, Wilkie had been determined to circulate his engravings. His work was well known through the engravings. He said that when he was in Paris in 1825 and he wasn't very well, he said he was completely well by people in the Louvre wanting to speak to him. You know, he was a celebrity. Corbett had to know about him. Okay, thank you very much. I'm going to clear that up. And the next question is another specific one and it asks, this is by an anonymous attendee with a clique also influenced by Reed's ideas. By sorry? By Reed's ideas with the clique. And I think I think we're thinking of people like an egg or frith. Yeah, I'm assuming that that's what the references. I don't know. I think that the line of interest here is perhaps through the grapholites and Ruskin. And that again slightly out on a limb approach, which also I think one of the interesting topics here, which was, is the use of color. You know that they're pioneering the use of prismatic color. And that suggests an interest in optics and in visuals, which could go back to Reed. Okay, thank you. And I'm just reading them as they come up. Another anonymous question said, you mentioned that Wilkie regarded history as to quote a massive individual responses, rather than a few grand events. Do you think this idea is consistent with any other artists later on throughout history? It has to do with particularly with this rather idea of totally unfashionable, difficult to grasp idea that history painting is our priority superior to all other kinds of painting. And Wilkie was really deconstructing that notion and putting up something else instead, which I don't think, you know, obviously Gavin Hamilton is subscribing to conventional history in the sense that he's big history paintings. After Wilkie, if you look at, I mean he had a huge influence on 19th century painting, the whole idea of a sort of psychologically inhabited history, which is European really starts with Wilkie. I think I said to talk about France, but the reading of the will in 1823 was commissioned by the King of Bavaria and went to Munich, where it had enormous influence on German painting. Again, I mean, it saddens me, but I have even quite recently seen Wilkie dismisses an anecdote painter. And you can see what they're getting at that it's so different from conventional heroic history that you have to put it somewhere else. The sad thing, of course, was Wilkie's close friend, Benjamin Robert Hayden, who wanted to paint history and didn't really succeed. Let's go to Michael Feinberg. Hello, Michael. Michael. And this is a fairly longish but I think we can, we can get the gist of it. Thank you very much as Michael. I really enjoyed how your argument about read creates space to view these artworks from different vantage points. I think this is fitting since many of the artworks you turn to the raft of the Medusa, for example, were produced in the time of globalizing colonial endeavors, even directly taking up colonial projects. I'd really like to hear if you think that there is a connection to be made between imperialism and Reed's ideas about common sense. I can't help but feel a sense of global or imperial anytime I hear the word common, but that might just be me. Thank you. Well, I think the short answer is that Marx greatly admired Reed. So, as far as that goes, Reed's notion was, I think that what Marx was the notion that we can construct society from our own gifts upwards. I mean, I wouldn't like to comment on imperialism and Reed. I think it's more than on Poole-David Hume and racism, which is a vex subject to know at the moment. But common sense. It doesn't mean it's not the usual sense of the word common sense it really means universal sense it's it's it's the senses that we share, rather than just overcooked it's the ordinary bloke who gets it right. That's part of an answer to that question. Thanks very much. Let me see, sorry, I'm just browsing the questions here there's a couple of, I'm not quite sure I understand this that I'll read it out. I may have missed something Barbara Turner she says which king of Bavaria. There were several. Well whoever was king in 1823. I mean, he's not strong. But there is a story attached to that because when George IV saw the picture. He wanted to buy it. And Wilkie was in the dilemma, which is in a sort of thing that was noticed at the time, having to choose between two reigning monarchs. He didn't know what to do, but he took advice from the perfect courtier Sir Thomas Lawrence, who very rightly said that he should honor his original contract and so he had to refuse his own king and send the picture off to Bavaria. I hope that's part of the answer that question, Barbara, and Rosa, Rosa Somerville. Again, a very specific question going back to Gavin Hamilton in Pizano. I think very much the same relates to Giotto did Hamilton go to Pisa in Siena and I would have thought. I mean, Pisa, after all, it's on the way to Rome. I mean, some people like, I don't know whether Alexander Ronson and James Barry went to Siena, but they certainly would have gone to Pisa, because they went through Pisa to get to Rome because they all landed at Livorno and went over land from Livorno to Rome. Hamilton traveled widely. I mean, he, you know, he said he had a great encyclopedic knowledge of Italian art. I really think that given his interest, his clear evidence interest in what they would call the Italian primitives that were heard before, in essence, that he very likely went to Siena. Suddenly, I think that that particular relationship between that prime and the figure from the piece of the Siena pulpit is pretty convincing. And as you say, I mean, Hamilton was a remarkable man and he's had this generosity of spirit that seems to have surrounded him. And of course, he's active in so many areas, of course, in terms of archaeology and dealing and, you know, as one of those movers and shakers in the world. I mean, it's, you know, I still think he's rather underestimated, not just as an artist, but as a presence. But I hope I've tried to put that right because it clearly was a serious present when you start to look at the international community around Hamilton in Rome, particularly in 1760, 1770s. There are a whole bunch of people like to my Sergiel, Fusili, Ponsman, Barry, David, you know, they can over can over had a particularly close relationship with Hamilton, who he actually described Hamilton as in loco di padre like my father, you know, which is why Melchior Missourini's biography of Canova is so important because that's somebody who knew Hamilton intimately, because Hamilton stood up for Canova from the very beginning he championed him. He was, I think, a contemporary John Naikman of the Rocks described him as a sweet blooded man. And he had, you know, he didn't mind. I mean, people like Benjamin West and Nathaniel dance were even once we were ripping off his compositions, things that he was barely more than plans, and he didn't seem to be this bit disturbed by it. He had opened studio and clearly offered his advice. I mean, he, we know a little bit about his relationship as a mentor to Anne Forbes, which is quite interesting and a woman artist who went from Edinburgh with a sort of scholarship gathered together by her relations was under particularly under the protection of Hamilton. David Allen was very close to Hamilton. Probably why David Allen won the prize the Concourse of Alastra, because Hamilton was premier who was principal of St. Luke's Academy in Rome. And intriguingly, while he was president, the second largest nationality in numbers of members after the Italians were Scots who were listed as Scots in the membership books of the Academy, so that it was a position of power. Yeah, indeed. Indeed. That's a great story. Do we have any other questions in the key? I can't see any other questions in the Q&A. Is there anyone who'd like to ask a direct? Well, hang on. Sorry, I beg your pardon. There's a murder, MacDonald. Sorry, murder. I didn't see that. I've heard that Hamilton's works inspired Cesarotti to translate Homer. Do you know anything about that? Well, I don't think necessarily. I think it was much more Ocean. You know, Cesarotti translated Ocean. He used controversy around Ocean because the academics in Italy, you know, they liked their view of Homer, whereas Blackwell, and then I didn't mention Robert Wood, but Wood was very important because Robert Wood traveled twice to the Aegean in 1740 and 1750s. It was essentially to demonstrate that Blackwell's thesis was right, that Homer was a naturalist. He went to look at the landscapes of the Aegean, compare them to the poetry, and say, Homer is a natural poet. And then he says that Homer should be freed from the hands of the lawyers and grammarians is a piece of great good fortune to letters, which, you know, which Cesarotti was on that side. And I think perhaps if the Homer translation was inspired, probably more by Blackwell and Wood than by Hamilton. Hamilton's pictures weren't that, I think that the six small pictures seemed to be in the studio, but the big pictures of course were painted individually by commission over a period of, well, almost 30 years. So, you know, we saw that project on it in a scale. And tragically, the fifth picture, the picture, the X-File and Romaki wasn't engraved. So nobody's ever really seen that what Hamilton was doing was creating a Hogarthian series of six engravings, and of course he'd been in London from 1750 to 56. And that's Paul before Felix for Lincoln's Inn was clearly an inspiration to him in painting a new kind of history. And Hogarth, of course, looked at the Raphael cartoons as clearly Hamilton did too. And the size and proportion of his paintings are smaller than the Raphael cartoons, but they are comparable. And I think, you know, that was the sort of combined mixture of Raphael and Hogarth inspired his idea of a series. And it sort of, I think he got too busy being a dealer, an archaeologist and didn't get the commissions. It's fun to fascinating that Hamilton has a paradoxically has this sort of English soldier in the middle of 1750s when everybody else is actually in Rome. He was pursuing a rather desultory career as a portrait painter. And one of his friends' work to his father said he's really distracted by grand ideas, but he'll get back to work. And of course he was the key grand ideas. He eventually went back to Rome. But he was particularly he painted Robert Wood, you know, Wood and Dawkins Tamera. And one of his commissions, the Angler Achilles was through a wood connection. Wood and Alan Ramsey were friendly and Hamilton and Ramsey were friendly. So, you know, if you talk about Hunter, there's a sort of nexus of individuals there which both in London and Rome, connecting them together. Zewa Choudhury. Hello there. You've got a question. And obviously, thank you for the wonderful talk. May I ask if Kant is an intermediary in your account of cousins' interest in read as Kant provides an important distinction between Scottish common sense and census communists in the third critique. Well, I can't answer that. Really. My philosophical knowledge is not deep enough to deal with that question. Nor can I. If anybody else can answer it or would like to make an observation. Please, please do. Because 26 minutes past three and so I would think it was probably time that we we wrapped up. It's a lovely day. I'm not that I can see much of it from my window but the sun's still shining so we all might get a bit of fresh air and exercise before the sun goes down. I would just like to thank Duncan once more for the really invigorating and suggestive talk and make me certainly think all sorts of connections and ideas and to take it right the way through two centuries in under an hour was was quite remarkable. So thank you again Duncan very much for giving up your time and also preparing this talk for us. We have a whole raft of events that as you know at the Mellon Center ongoing events are our next event is actually tomorrow. I think I might be saying that. No, I beg your pardon. It's a week on Friday. Disorienting the gaze. We're on war as early films that's on the 19th of February, but then if you I'm just scrolling down here that there's a whole series of events that we have to please do, do keep a close eye on because we were putting new events up there or all the time. And very pleased to be able to do so and like everybody else we hope that we were back at the center before too long but we'll obviously we'll just have to wait until we get the green light so. I think it's good to goodbye from from me and from Duncan and from Ella and thank you Ella and Danny doing such a brilliant job today and thank you all for participating today and being with us virtually at the Paul Mellon Center so we hope to see you again soon. Thank you very much.