Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714

Book excerpt: Scottish portraiture of the second half of the seventeenth century has 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 (active c.1690-1737). About this family almost nothing was known. Thorough archival research has yielded a substantial 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 solicitor. Also, the legal community in which the Scougalls were embedded could be defined, 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 painter L. Schuneman (active c.1655/60- 1667 or slightly later) and his Scottish successor James Carrudus (active c.1668-1683 or later). In this book, an extensive inventory of Scottish portraits, with an emphasis on the Scougall painters, is made up for the period 1644-1694. Attributions to various artists and sitter identifications where possible, and an impression of the subsequent period up to 1714, in which the oeuvres and life data of the principal portrait painters have been compiled. Many paintings have been photographed and compared, which had never been done before. Moreover, these data 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 first half of the seventeenth century, and the works of Sir John Baptiste de Medina and of the successful Scottish painters of the eighteenth century.