Law and Order: The Scougall Family, Portrait Painters in a Legal Community : Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714

Abstract

Scottish portraiture of the second half of the seventeenth century had hardly been researched until now. In this period one family of painters became very prolific, consisting of David Scougall (1625-1685), his son John Scougall (1657-1737), and a third member, George Scougall (b. 1670?, active c.1690-1737). About this family hardly anything was known. Thorough archival research has yielded a large amount of biographical information. Besides family relations and life dates it has become clear that David Scougall had two careers, as a portrait painter and as a writer/under-clerk. His son called himself a ‘limner’ (= portrait painter) throughout his life. Unfortunately, not much information has surfaced regarding George Scougall. Also the legal community in which the Scougalls were embedded could be established, as well as an extended network of family relations. The most important contemporaries of the Scougalls until the arrival of the later Sir John Baptiste de Medina (1659-1710) in 1694 were the, most probable, German painter L. Schüneman (active c.1655/60-1667 or slightly later) and his Scottish successor James Carrudus (active c.1668-1683 or later), who was probably trained in the studio of Schüneman. In this dissertation, an extensive inventory of Scottish portraits, with an emphasis on the Scougall painters, is made for the period 1644-1694, which had not been done before, including attributions to various artists and sitter identifications where possible. Research was much aided by using photographic archives, visiting over a hundred public and private collections, and by photographing the works in situ. Subsequently, analysing them stylistically and to gain a true understanding of the works in all respects, such as brush stroke, surface, structure, colour, support, size, framing, in order to be able to distinguish and define the various artists within the large group of more than 600 portraits that I have assembled. The catalogue raisonné of the works of David Scougall forms a part of this dissertation as well as the results of technical research. Costume analysis is included in the dissertation and an extensive glossary of terms that I use to elucidate the attribution of the works is provided in the introduction to the catalogue raisonné of the work of David Scougall. Special attention is given to framing, as various period frames adorn the portraits up to the present day. The results of this research provide the first comprehensive survey of Scottish portraiture from 1644 to 1694 and an impression of the subsequent period up to 1714, in which, through in-depth study, the oeuvres and lives of the principal portrait painters have been compiled. Many paintings have been photographed and compared, which had never been done before. A rich overview of portraiture in Scotland could be attained. Moreover, it could be complemented by describing the social and (art) historical context in which the portraits were made. The works of these painters now form a solid bridge between the works from the start of the seventeenth century, and the work of Sir John Baptiste de Medina and the Scottish painters of the eighteenth century.