Die erste Generation schafft das Vermögen, die zweite verwaltet es. Die dritte studiert Kunstgeschichte, und die vierte verkommt vollens.1
The third generation studies art history: I had never thought about Bismarck’s sour analysis of how a family goes into decline until my friend C.H.S. quoted it to me. We were walking on a spring evening along the clifftop path at Dunbar, the sky dimming out over the sea towards Fife – views out to the Bass Rock and Berwick Law – silver, faintest yellow, misting grey. The path confined on the landward side by a redstone wall, a wooden pavilion visible over it, high like a signal box, like a visitant from the world of Edward Hopper. Then a tall block, a failing hotel, lonely in its own grounds at the end of the row, as though it were a place of rendezvous in a thriller, awaiting a secret landing from the sea. Lights in only two upstairs rooms. My friend smiled and shook his head, repeating the third generation studies art history.
I admitted at once to myself that there is a sense in which it describes me and most of my friends, what we are and what we do. I hope that we do other things as well, although it is true enough that the visual arts and their contexts and histories have become one of the main preoccupations of my life.
Naturally, that interest has a subsidiary focus on that which is local to the north of Scotland. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Aberdeen and the north existed as an almost autonomous province, differing in political and religious loyalties from the populous Lowlands, they supported a school of painters as well as a school of poets and a handful of composers. At least three generations of Catholic Alexanders worked in the city and in the houses of the Jacobite magnates spread along the river valleys and the coasts. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, John Alexander painted the ceiling of the hall of Gordon Castle with the Abduction of Persephone, an allegory of usurpation, of political winter, of the absolute importance of a policy of biding one’s time. Rumours and patience, a quietist, almost fatalist, theology to sustain the years of waiting, elegant portraits by the elder Alexander hanging in the same cold-lit panelled rooms as his son Cosmo’s clandestine, sometimes small-scale, royal portraits of the shadow kings far away. One of John Alexander’s sons, Charles, became a monk of Würzburg, where he worked as a portraitist and muralist. Almost all of his works were destroyed in one night in one RAF raid.
The other son, named Cosmo after his noble godfather Cosmo Gordon, who was in turn the godson of Grand Duke Cosimo of Tuscany, lived all his life in those shadowed circles defined by absolute loyalty to the exiled Stuarts. He fought at Culloden and escaped to Rome, where he painted a defiant self-portrait – young, sandy-haired and bright-eyed – in the act of painting the portrait of James VIII. He travelled in Jacobite circles in France and Holland and inherited a house in London from his fellow Aberdonian Catholic (and probably, kinsman) James Gibbs, architect of St Martin-in-the-Fields. From the 1760s, Cosmo worked on the eastern seaboard of America, and possibly in the Caribbean, amongst the exiled Jacobites, taking the later-celebrated Gilbert Stuart as a pupil. He died in Edinburgh in 1772.
The quality of Cosmo’s work is very uneven, partly due to the harried circumstances of his life in the shadows, but he is a figure who remains throughout his career a dissident. He painted a handful of Calvinists loyal to the Hanoverians when official commissions came his way, but otherwise he was the portraitist of his own Jacobite and Catholic communities, communities which in his lifetime were in eclipse and decline. His world has the sad charm of the celebrations of the defeated, the courage of those from whom the main tides of history move ineluctably away. Little is written about him or about his world, that cohesive, forgotten northern Scottish culture of Latin letters, Stuart loyalism, and religious quietism.
That world fascinates me, partly because it is so difficult to describe. I was writing to my friend in Cambridge with his profound knowledge of the Scottish hills, trying to evoke the transient existence after Culloden of an alternative society, even a kind of alternative reality, here in the north, among those hills, and in the outposts of exile:
The records of the sons of those castles beyond Corgarff are as likely to be at Regensburg or Valladolid as in Scotland. I don’t know if you remember that I wrote about visiting the Scots College in Salamanca last September … about the fireworks and about setting forth with the Rector to dine about eleven at night. There in the middle of the old library, with its shelves of vellum-bound Patrologies, was the complete working library of an early modern soldier of fortune – books of fortification and ballistics – which had belonged to a Scots colonel in the Spanish service. A world little known, precisely the world of John Buchan’s dark double Maurice Walsh, also a mid-twentieth-century writer of historical thrillers, but on the other side: most of his Highland or Irish heroes are ‘Wild Geese’ or Jacobites in foreign service.
At the first flashpoint of the Jacobite conflicts in 1688, Graham of Claverhouse’s campaigns became the subject of one of the great forgotten works of Scottish letters: a passionate and extraordinary epic poem, a part of that Scotland which Scotland itself has forgotten, that core of Scotland’s selfhood which is locked up in the Latin language. The Grameid2 was arguably one of the most suc cessful poems of the seventeenth century in the British Isles; certainly, it was the most beautiful and powerful thing written in seventeenth-century Scotland, perhaps in the same way that Peter Levi claims the Irish ‘Lament for Arthur O’Leary’ as, without qualification, the most beautiful poem of the eighteenth.
As well as finely observed formalities, authentic and unapologetic grandeurs – ‘Graham, the light and glory of the north, the descendant of lion-bearing kings’3 – there are some of the very first descriptions of the outlands and uplands of Scotland in literature: Graham’s journey through ‘the Grampians, through regions of eternal frost’, a night march under the constellation of Aries, through a territory of frozen rivers, scarlet and burnished armour against the snowy glens, the great lion-banner of Scotland cracking open against the white slopes.4 Philip the poet himself carried that standard. The mustering of the Highlanders is like the list of ships in Homer, two Scotlands coming together, two worlds. The poet from the fruitful red-earthed Angus plains is caught up in the wonderful, wild forlorn hope amidst the hosts pouring forth to muster from the remotest western hills.
All of these lost splendours are in the background of Cosmo Alexander’s world, and for years I had thought how much I would like to own an example of his work. One day a message came through from an art historian friend whose knowledge of British portraiture is encyclopaedic. He had spotted an Alexander at a small auction house in South London, in a sale at the end of August. He had authenticated it on sight, and forecast that it would go for a modest price. We were travelling, so I left a bid by telephone, and only found out when we reached London a week later that the bid had been successful.
We had not exactly planned for this eventuality, so, on a September day which seemed to hold all the stored heat of the summer that was passing, we took the small train into unfamiliar territories of brick and terracotta which I have hitherto associated mostly with the Edwardian novelists, with E. Nesbit and H.G. Wells. We moved through the hot city from the environs of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, at first through very quiet streets, empty save for Asian nannies each in charge of one small child in school uniform. Then we crossed one of London’s invisible borders and we were in Caribbean London, yams in the grocers’ shops, music from the open windows of cars, the streets filling up with people.
The auction house had the feeling of the morning after a party – dishevelled stacks of pictures and furniture, gaps on the walls – but one glance across the room was enough to establish that the picture was indeed by Alexander. A gentleman of around 1760 stands in a red dressing gown and a blue turban in front of a bookcase. We would later deduce from the one legible title on his shelves that the sitter was a Scottish doctor called James Grieve, who worked in London and Russia.
A standard-sized portrait, which is to say about thirty by thirty-six inches, seems quite small on the wall but, with its frame, it becomes a very large object as soon as you try to move it anywhere. We had underestimated this difficulty, to put it mildly, and we had reserved sleeper tickets for the night train to Scotland that same evening. A solution appeared in the form of a mini-cab just big enough to take the picture lying flat in its boot – the driver was dreadlocked, genial and calm. We chatted happily about his Scottish name and about language and the origins of words as we drove through the lengthening shadows of late summer London, passing branch-line stations, high streets of takeaways, minicab offices, corner newsagents. Skirting the edges of dusty parks, little greens and commons, heavy plane trees in heavy air. Boys scuffing at a football, a red bus passing the end of a stock brick street. The gutters brimmed with dust: desiccated filaments of the flowers of July and August.
We passed the expensive cafés and bars in the Fulham Road, white stucco streets, then red brick and terracotta, then stock brick again, and we unloaded the picture on the pavement in front of our friends’ tall house near Euston. Their student son greeted us with the enquiry ‘Cosmo to go?’ as he opened the door. We mustered cardboard and bubble-wrap, achieving a respectable package, just about manageable by two people. Feeling a little like undergraduates – lugging an unwieldy object towards the station with the assistance of the whole family – we managed to walk to Euston and then to steer the painting on a trolley the considerable length of the night train. It just inched round the door of the compartment and we wedged it into place with bags and folded blankets.
We woke just south of Montrose to a different season and, in the clear light of six in the morning, we could see fields already dusted with frost, cold mist rolling off them downhill and towards the sea. Cool, autumnal sunlight lit the farce of closed-off streets around Aberdeen station and a scramble up steep steps to meet our taxi. Again, the painting just fitted in behind us.
Some of the fields were already reaped and the leaves were beginning to turn as we drove northwards. The taxi driver went extra slowly on the bumpy track down towards the house, out of consideration for the painting, and we drew up on the gravel to find our omni-competent friend Dan already up and dressed and sitting on the front doorstep, drinking coffee and catching what little warmth was beginning to come into the sunlight. He moved into action at once, unwrapping, finding picture wire, measuring, securing, so that half an hour later we were hoisting the painting into its new home over the fireplace. The room seemed for a moment almost to shimmer as it reconfigured itself around the scarlet and blue of the Alexander portrait. Then it became impossible to imagine that it had ever looked otherwise.
Thus this work out of the shadowed world of the Aberdeenshire Jacobites has come home to a part of northern Scotland which might fairly be described, in the historian’s phrase, as a ‘dark corner’. At the other end of the room, there is another portrait, a young blue-eyed masher of the Walter Scott period, beautifully dressed in the grey and buff of his era, slightly Byronic in the way that he is painted with a day’s growth of stubble, slouched with his left arm slung over the back of his neoclassical chair. And between the two there stretches the gulf of the crucial ‘sixty years’ which separate Culloden from the reasonable Edinburgh to which the divided realities of the mid-eighteenth century are the stuff of historical romance.
1 ‘The first and second generation make and consolidate the money, the third studies art history, and the fourth loses the plot entirely.’ Experience suggests that it is relatively rare in the Anglophone world for there to be a fourth generation.
2 James Philip of Almerieclose, The Grameid (Panurgi Philocaballi Scoti Grameidos libri sex), ed. Alexander Murdoch (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1888).
3 ‘Gramus, hyperborei decus et fax unica Scoti [ … ] / Atque leonigeros attingens sanguine Reges’, ibid., p. 41.
4 ‘– signa Caledoniis pro Rege attolit in oris’, ibid., p. 46.