Party-Coloured Plaid? Portraits of Eighteenth-Century Scots in Tartan

This article offers a close reading of a series of portraits of eighteenth-century Scots in which the sitters — men of élite social status and, in some instances, elevated military rank — are shown dressed in different painterly representations of tartan. Focusing on portraits produced in Scotland, London and Europe by artists including Pompeo Batoni and Allan Ramsay, it seeks to offer an alternative account to the production and consumption of tartan as a tangible textile or a worn item of masculine dress, to give an art historical overview of its mutability as it is represented in eighteenth-century portraiture. Casting tartan as a potent agent in the pictorial representation of identity, the article argues that it literally enveloped its sitters in a textile that was variously political (as an idiom of rebellion and loyalty), cultural, social and economic. The portraits, both surviving and lost, are discussed in conjunction with contemporary travel literature of visits to Scotland and unpublished correspondence so as to represent the many discursive threads of tartan in the eighteenth century.