Art: Culture and Collections

The growing circulation of visual art and its widening appearance in domestic collections and public display is an important moniker of the advance of consumerism, cosmopolitanism and innovation. What once had been (and for much of the eighteenth century still remained) an international aristocratic pastime suffused itself steadily into the houses and purchases of the professional well-to-do, bringing with it variety of origin, variety of subject, and whole new genres which could inflect the manner in which indoor and outdoor environments were represented and understood as they came under the control of society's elites. Such new images could, in their turn, embed the centrality of questions of landscape, geographical conditions and human societies in the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers who moved in intellectual spheres much removed from the visual arts.

Artistic representation was thus a way both of owning through sight and of seeing through the eyes of others, both the colonising gaze and the visual mechanics of sympathy. The viewer of a painting was like Adam Smith's third-party conscience, surveying, discriminating, judging and sympathetically engaging. Sometimes the questions raised to the viewer were living and flexible, sometimes textual and symbolic. Paintings in particular genres could be ordered by lot for interior decoration: any difficulties over import duties (gradually being eased in England) could be addressed by imitations carried out by local artists, either of particular paintings or of general styles. In 1691, Sir James Dick relied on his bailie Alexander Brand's taste in selecting paintings to furnish his stairs: Brand was himself a manufacturer of decorative leatherwork, such as Dick had brought, probably from the Netherlands or Flanders, for his previous house in 1676. Brand likewise chose Flemish or Netherlandish pictures for the new Prestonfield stairs. In 1692, Brand supplied ‘91¼ skines of Gold Leather’ to the architect Sir William Bruce (1630–1710), some of which seem to have come from the Netherlands, in a series of bills for interior decoration which totalled £433 8s. In 1729, Sir James Rochead of Inverleith (1702–37) paid the painter William Robertson for ten paintings, at a total cost of £11 4s: these included three still lifes, a seascape and a pastoral, together with five classical paintings on love-related themes.