10 Portraits of Scottish Women

On a quick trip to Edinburgh we stopped in at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which was a really beautiful and well curated art gallery, and entry is free. Inside the ‘red sandstone Gothic revival’ building are hundreds of portraits, including these ten notable women with ties to Scotland.

1. Mary I of Scotland (1542-1587) by an unknown artist. Mary was raised in France. In this portrait she is 18, wearing the mourning clothes of the French Court because her mother, father-in-law and husband had all died within 18 months of each other. She returned to Scotland soon after this portrait was painted.

   

2. Fanny Vandergrift Osbourne Stevenson (1840-1913). Fanny was born in Indianapolis and had an eventful life. She followed her first husband from New York to Nevada, making the long and arduous trip alone with her children only to find that her husband was philandering and that the life was rough–she learned to shoot a pistol and roll her own cigarettes. She took her children, sans husband, to Europe in 1875 and started making a living for herself as a magazine writer. She met Robert Louis Stevenson and encouraged his writing. He followed her to the USA and she decided to divorce Osbourne and marry Stevenson in 1880 and they were a devoted couple until he died in 1894. She edited a lot of his work and it was thanks to her that he returned to an abandoned manuscript and published it as The Strange Tale of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.

   

3. Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936) by Peter Induni. Born in Dublin, Traquair married a Scottish paleontologist and moved to Edinburgh in 1874. She was a gifted artist and became particularly known for her participation in the Scottish arts-and-crafts movement. In a prolific career she produced murals, illuminated manuscripts, embroidery and jewellery.

   

   

4. Helen Cruickshank (1886-1975) bust by Vincent Butler, photo by . She was a poet, suffragette and key proponent of the Scottish Renaissance of the early to mid-twentieth century. She encouraged many other writers and served as the Scottish Secretary of PEN for many years. You can read some of her poetry here.
5. Naomi Mitchison (1897 to 1999) bust by Archie Forrest, painting by Wyndham Lewis. Mitchison wrote 90 novels in a whole bunch of genres including Science Fiction, which is probably the hardest one. She was a committed socialist (Orwell put on his ‘list of people‘ unsuitable for writing anti-Communist propaganda), a botanist, and advocate for Scottish island communities and for the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her works include Mucking Around: Five Continents Over Fifty Years (1981) and The Bull Calves (1947), an historical novel about the Jacobite uprising.
6. Muriel Spark (b.1918-2006) by Dr. Alexander Moffat. Spark is the author of a brilliant book, The Prime of Miss Brodie (1961) and 43 others. Nuff said really. Moffat talks about the process of painting her portrait here.
7. Thea Musgrave (b.1928 ) “Thea Musgrave–Orfeo II” (1975) by Victoria Crowe. Musgrave is a composer of opera, choral and classical music who lives in the United States. The artist wrote of this painting, “In this portrait aspects of Thea’s own music, with reference to mythic imagery, history and the Arts together with the abstract drama of her composition and her creative life in the USA are balanced by the stillness and intensity of the composer.” Here is a recording of Orfeo I. You can listen to “Dawn for solo oboe” here. Her musicography is here.
8. Joyce Gunn Cairns (b.1948) “Self portrait as Faust”. I’m not totally sure but this is one of my favourite works in the gallery. It’s possibly because the artist has a literary bent; she took a degree in German and Comparative Religion before studying Art and this picture sort of encapsulates those things. She has said of this portrait, “I was reading Goethe’s Faust at the time and the etching is possibly a hybrid of Faust’s ambition allied to callousness and Gretchen’s grief and fear when she is abandoned by Faust.”
9. Jackie Kay (b. 1961) by Clae Eastgate “Red Red”. She’s a poet and playwright and novelist. Professor of Creative writing at the University of Newcastle. Read her poem “Out of the Clyde” here.

   

10. Carol Ann Duffy (b.1955) by Clae Eastgate “Air and Light”. Duffy was born in the Gorbals, an area of Glasgow that not tool long ago was considered a working-class slum. In 2009 she was appointed Poet Laureate. Here is her poem “The Way My Mother Speaks”.