Facing History: Galleries and Portraits in Waverley’s Historiography

Abstract

Scott’s Waverley (1814) holds two paramount moments of portrait‐viewing: Waverley’s pause in the Holyrood gallery, and the double portrait’s appearance in the restored manor‐house. The gallery, with its alleged portraits of a line of Scottish kings, proclaims Stuart legitimacy. The narrator, however, views the paintings not with the eyes of 1745, but forensically, calling on a basic knowledge of art history – and is thus able to deny their antiquity. This critical knowledge belongs to early nineteenth‐century Edinburgh, when public art exhibitions commenced in Henry Raeburn’s studio, and when detailed catalogues were widely published. The double portrait’s description even more deliberately juxtaposes the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Waverley’s narrator likens this portrait to a Raeburn – who was not yet born in 1745. This paper investigates why Scott makes portraiture so central in historiography, and how he turns away from Burkean precepts to establish a historical practice to do justice to the alterity of the mid‐eighteenth century. While recent Scott criticism focuses on contextualizing Scott within the thriving genres of historical novel and national tale, this article frames questions of genre and of the representation of history in terms of the Romantic understanding of art and of galleries.