Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Making of a Myth A Study in Portraiture, 1720-1892

The subject of this book-an Italian-born exiled Prince-has become an icon of misjudged romanticism and Scottish nationalism; much of this is due to the way he has been portrayed over the years. This study traces how the enduring visual image of Prince Charles Edward Stuart was created, beginning with his birth in 1720 and ending with the exhibition of John Pettie's Prince Charles Edward Stuart Entering the Ballroom at Holyrood - probably still the most enduring and popular image of the Stuart prince-at the Royal Academy in 1892. This book considers the role of portraiture in the Stuart court, both before and after exile in 1688 and how the well-established traditions of royal portraiture and image-making were used by the Stuart dynasty to promote their ambitions and stature. Charles's birth in 1720 resulted in a flurry of portrait commissions in which he was depicted as the royal heir apparent. The messianic role with which he was invested reached its apotheosis with the Jacobite uprising of 1745. He adopted the costume and manners of an idealized Highland chieftain and within the space of a few months created an abiding iconography which was to endure long after his death. The major portraits of Charles executed during his lifetime are considered, from the early court portraits of Antonio David and Domenico Dupra to the final images of a broken man by Ozias Humphrey and Hugh Douglas Hamilton. Alongside this, there is a thorough examination of a parallel phenomenon in which works of art, observing established parameters, were copied and adapted, and then re-copied, until the tartan-clad ideal of 1745 began to eclipse the real person. The revering of Charles Edward and the manufacture of items bearing his likeness are compared to other 'cults' of the individual and contrasted with the 'commercialization of politics' which several commentators have identified as a coherent phenomenon of late eighteenth-century British life. The extent to which the material culture that surrounded the persona of Charles Edward was indicative of a descent into sentimentality by his supporters has tended to be overplayed by historians anxious to marginalize Jacobitism as an impotent threat. However, after his death it did not take long for the romanticism of Burns and Scott and the bogus charades of King George IV, the Sobieski Stuarts, and Queen Victoria to complete the process whereby Prince Charles was turned into 'Bonnie Prince Charlie,' staple of the shortbread tin and Drambuie bottle. The book is primarily art historical, but approaches its subject away from the connoisseurial high ground and intends to suggest that all forms of pictorial representation are equally valid of study in understanding how an historical individual was (and is) perceived. In doing so it attempts to place the portraiture with the context of recent revisionist studies of Jacobitism, eighteenth-century propaganda and Scottish identity. Based on a close examination of the archives of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, it intends to unravel many of the inconsistencies that have befogged studies of the portraits and address some recent art historical controversies, notably regarding Jacobite glass.