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Highlands and Glens

A Hell Created by Man | In Focus: William McTaggart

In Focus: William McTaggart

William McTaggart's The Emigrants 1883-9 is a beautiful seascape topped by a typically unsettled Scottish sky, which the artist painted out of doors using bold touches of paint. You could easily mistake the people in the foreground of this picture for holiday makers. But close by are small boats due to ferry them out to an old-fashioned sailing ship, just visible in the distance, which is bound for America or Canada.

William McTaggart The Emigrants (1883-9) View in Tate Collection Oil on canvas, 946 x 1410 mm © Tate 2005 Purchased 1931

McTaggart began the painting in the year that Alexander Mackenzie's book about the Highland Clearances was published. McTaggart's sister was one of many Scots who had been forced to emigrate in the mid nineteenth century.

But this is not a descriptive painting to bring home the horror faced by people forced to leave their homeland. The style is evocative .of a holiday by the sea. McTaggart's love of the sea originated in his childhood spent on the Mull of Kintyre and it features in most of his pictures. This painting started out as a straightforward landscape; the figures were only added years later. Perhaps this explains the apparent disparity between subject and mood. In fact, one way of looking at The Emigrants is as the ideal kind of holiday scene such emigrants might picture in their minds from another continent.

McTaggart was one of a number of Scottish artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were innovative in their style of painting and use of colour. He was, for instance, perhaps the only British artist to consistently adopt a style of painting similar in brushwork and technique to French Impressionism (which he may not have known) while others like S.J. Peploe and James Paterson explored bold combinations of colour.