The various paintings that depict William Wallace and Robert the Bruce are in many ways the most iconographic references that we have. One of the oldest and most significant surviving portraits of Wallace is a pencil sketch by David Steuart Erskine, the eleventh earl of Buchan (1742-1829). It is supposedly based on a medieval original, and Wallace “takes the form of a bearded warrior with a dragon on top of his helmet.”84 The piece is housed in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.
The scene in Sir William Allan’s Heroism and Humanity: An Incident in the Life of Robert the Bruce (1840; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow) depicts the king with his right hand raised to heaven in denunciation of those who have abandoned a woman who has just given birth. The topic is apparently based not on any historical moment but on an incident in Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather: Being the History of Scotland. According to Scott, while the Bruce was in Ireland on campaign, he was forced to retreat; however, he discovered that a laundress who was with his force had just given birth, and so instead of leaving her behind and at the mercy of the English army, the Bruce rallied his troops to fight. John Morrison comments that this work displays the Bruce as the “embodiment of nobility and, as the title indicates, humanity. It was these qualities, Allan suggests, that motivated the heroes of the Wars of Independence and allowed Scotland to emerge unconquered to take an honourable place alongside England, rather than subject to it.”85 Phillip’s Bruce About to Receive the Sacrament on the Morning Previous to the Battle of Bannockburn (1843; The Mechanics’ Institute, Brechin, Angus, Scotland) stresses the Bruce’s “saintly character,” and the presentation aligns him within the British heroic tradition rather than a “singularly Scottish one.”86 In the twentieth century, Stewart Carmichael (1867-1950) captured the mystical elements of the Bruce. His 1943 oil Robert the Bruce Receiving the Wallace Sword from the Sprit of Scotland (sold at Christie’s, London, November 25, 2004, to the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, Scotland) depicts the king kneeling and receiving the sword from a “Lady of the Lake”-type figure.
World History
