{"id":2587,"date":"2019-09-20T11:35:30","date_gmt":"2019-09-20T11:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2587"},"modified":"2019-09-22T10:25:42","modified_gmt":"2019-09-22T10:25:42","slug":"stephen-copley-award-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2587","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Copley Research Report: Jonathan Taylor on Alexander Runciman"},"content":{"rendered":"

This report is by Jonathan Taylor (University of Surrey)<\/a>, a recipient of the Stephen Copley Research grant. Find out how to apply for this BARS award here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

My Stephen Copley Research Award funded a trip to Edinburgh to consult the National Records of Scotland and the Scottish National Gallery\u2019s collections of letters and drawings by the painter Alexander Runciman (1736-85).<\/p>\n

What interests me about Runciman \u2014 who is best known as the creator of the first (now sadly lost) decorative scheme based on James Macpherson\u2019s Ossian epics \u2014 is his heroic treatment of female characters from the epic tradition. Whereas other late eighteenth-century artists (most notably Angelica Kauffman) had pioneered painters\u2019 treatment of women as heroic subjects, they also tended to circumscribe the heroism of female epic characters, such as Andromache and Penelope, to passive acts of suffering and endurance. In several instances, Runciman went a step further, representing the suffering of female epic heroes not as something in which they have no agency, but something that they bravely elect to undergo. This is most obviously the case in Runciman\u2019s depiction of Corgan Cargl\u00e2, a hunter from Macpherson\u2019s Ossian, who chooses to be imprisoned in a cave for life rather than submit to her husband\u2019s murderer.<\/p>\n

Before my research trip, I thought I had discerned the origins of Runciman\u2019s contemporarily unusual approach to female heroism in preparatory drawings for a rendering of the death of Dido, which appear to give Virgil\u2019s tragic heroine more and more agency in successive sketches. The truth was, as I found out, both more interesting and more confusing. The drawings (held by the Scottish National Gallery) do gradually shift away from the passive and sentimental renderings of Dido that were popular with earlier eighteenth-century artists, in which the queen typically appears to have died as the direct result of her abandonment by Aeneas, rather than (in any obvious way) by her own hand. However, while what appears to be the final drawing shows Dido very much alive, clutching the sword with which she will end her own life and evidently weighing her options \u2014 an artistic choice which emphasises her agency and tacitly associates her with the Classical tradition of tragic but heroic suicide populated by figures including Seneca and Lucan \u2014 the painting itself rows back on these innovations and offers a conventional portrayal of Dido as a passive and inert victim.<\/p>\n

\"\"National Records of Scotland<\/em><\/p>\n

A year later, as I discovered in a letter held at the National Records of Scotland, Runciman was contemplating an even more drastic return to the gendered conventions of male heroism and female passivity that typify the epic. His original plan for what he would later turn into the Ossian decorative scheme at Sir John Clerk\u2019s Penicuik House (near Edinburgh) was an uncompromisingly manly and conventionally heroic scheme based upon the life of Achilles. The only female character Runciman proposed for this series was Achilles\u2019 mother, Thetis, whose agency, as Runciman\u2019s detailed description makes clear, would not even have extended to untying her own sandals.<\/p>\n

Evidently, Runciman later opted for the Ossian illustrations, which put Corban Cargl\u00e2 centre stage, but even here, he agonised over whether to represent the imprisoned hunter as an awe-inspiring figure in her own right, or as a damsel in distress saved by Macpherson\u2019s epic hero Fingal. Two preparatory drawings (also at the Scottish National Gallery) show Runciman wavering between these options, with a muscled and armed Fingal occupying the foreground in one and a (literally towering) Corban Cargl\u00e2 dominating the frame (with Fingal relegated to the background and looking up awe-struck) in the other.<\/p>\n

My findings have made me reflect upon external factors that may have caused Runciman\u2019s apparent flip-flopping, what his prevarication may tell us more broadly about the difficulties or potential repercussions of portraying female heroes during the Romantic period, and the particular problems he may have faced as a male artist championing this model of heroism. I am very grateful to BARS for funding what has been a very productive few days of confusion!<\/p>\n

By Jonathan Taylor (University of Surrey)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This report is by Jonathan Taylor (University of Surrey), a recipient of the Stephen Copley Research grant. Find out how to apply for this BARS award here. My Stephen Copley… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[7,20,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2587"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2595,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587\/revisions\/2595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}