R. R. McIan: A Biographical Overview

R. R. McIan: A Biographical Overview
Dr Charlie Edward Lynch
 

While Robert Ranald McIan’s romanticised Highland paintings remain well-known today, are widely reproduced and often used as visual references for historic modes of dress, their creator’s life has remained shrouded in obscurity. This short biography draws closely on the research of his biographer, Belinda Morse, to untangle what can be clearly discerned about McIan’s life and work. Born around 1803, he was an actor, artist and theatrical costume designer, who emerged from relative obscurity in the 1840s as an authority on Highland costumes and customs, and in the process achieved a remarkable degree of social and cultural success. The apex of his career coincided with an upsurge in enthusiasm amongst British social and cultural elites for ‘a new image of the Scottish Highlands, one far removed from the realities of rural crisis and economic collapse, a fusion of blood sports and wild romance.’(1) Along with his collaborator, James Logan, McIan contributed to this trend with their major work, Clans of the Scottish Highlands. Through the then novel medium of lithography, this depicted in dramatic and romanticised fashion, costumes and tartans associated with particular Highland clans.

McIan's self image, which he used as the dust-cover for the first edition of the Clans of the Scottish Highlands

McIan left no autobiography or memoirs, and it seems likely that he was deliberately vague about details of his early life, perhaps to encourage a sense of romantic mystery. The only known source for McIan’s background appears to be a theatrical pamphlet published in 1848, Actors by Gaslight. The account that this document gives cannot be considered fully reliable. In this McIan claimed to have been born in Inverness-shire around 1803, the son of the similarly named Robert McIan, who was said to have been a sheep farmer. The McIans were a kindred who claimed shared descent and affinity with the MacDonalds of Glencoe, a branch of the numerous Clan Donald. Robert McIan’s subsequent claim to have been baptised a Roman Catholic was to some extent corroborated by traditional Catholicism of both the MacDonalds of Glencoe and their sept, the McIans. However, by this account Robert also claimed to have been educated in Liverpool and also at the village of Nesscliffe, Shropshire. Therefore, it should be asked why and how the Highlander, Robert McIan, had early associations with two distinct areas of England. It could be that his family led a nomadic existence and the story that his father was a shepherd was a later concoction, to perhaps buttress his Highland identity. Whatever the reality behind these curious details, McIan then claimed that he had been placed as an apprentice with a nurseryman (a farmer who grew fruit) in the Eastern Highland market town of Dingwall. Evidently, this was not to his taste, as he then enlisted in a regiment of the British Army, the Black Watch. However, he was then ‘bought out’, perhaps by a wealthier relative or benefactor. This implies that his decision to join the army was quickly regretted and in effect, he had to be ‘rescued’ from military service on the payment of a substantial fee. Again, suggesting the intervention of family, Robert was then ‘placed’ as an apprentice to a stationer in Leicester Square, London. However, this seems to have been no more agreeable than his previous positions, as he again ran away, this time to Glasgow, then a thriving mercantile city and trading port, at the heart of the industrial revolution. Here, he found employment with the Glasgow Theatre Company as a scene painter.

McIan’s tangled biography becomes somewhat more certain in August 1825 when he appeared on stage in the Yorkshire town of Halifax in the supporting role of ‘Dougal’ in a production of ‘Rob Roy’. This was a popular melodrama, many versions of which had been ‘pillaged’ for stage from the work of Sir Walter Scott.(2) McIan, who as we have already learned, had briefly been a soldier, had now found a niche portraying a certain breed of military Scotsmen. But curiously, during this period it seems that he identified himself as ‘Robert Jones’. Without in depth genealogical research, the reasons for his double identity can only be speculated upon. It could be that Robert was hiding from former employers or creditors, although this theory could be countered in that that appearing on a public stage in any guise might be considered unwise for anyone keen to maintain a low profile. But another explanation can be advanced, although it must remain speculative. It is possible that ‘McIan’ was in fact the name of Robert’s mother, that she was a native of Inverness-shire, and that his father ‘Jones’ was English, hence the connections to Shropshire and Liverpool. However, it is unlikely that the truth behind these shifting identities will ever be settled definitively.

Life as a touring actor led McIan to the genteel English city of Bath. Here he continued to play flamboyant stage Scottish personalities in productions derived from the work of Walter Scott: ‘Guy Mannering’ and ‘The Fair Maid of Perth’. When appearing on stage, Robert was so ‘buoyant, even manic’ according to Antonia Fraser, that a colleague insisted that he should not be permitted to handle lethal weapons while acting. This was the heyday of melodrama…. It was amid this theatrical and artistic milieu that Robert first encountered a young woman, Frances Whittaker, who was to become his wife and perhaps the most important influence on his work. Frances (known as Fanny) was a talented painter who came from a prosperous family of Bath cabinetmakers, auctioneers and upholsterers. As a consequence, she enjoyed considerably higher social status in this class-bound society than Robert McIan, the itinerant actor of uncertain provenance. It is likely that their relationship was from its earliest stage based upon a shared affinity for art. Whatever the details, in February 1831 the couple eloped to Bristol where they were married in an Anglican ceremony at which Robert curiously signed his name as ‘Jones’. Despite the swiftness of their marriage and the then influential perception of the dubious respectability of the acting profession, Morse pointed out that it appears that Robert was subsequently accepted by the Whitaker family to the extent that Fanny’s younger brother, John, named his son after him.(3)

After three years of married life in Bath, the McIans moved to London to pursue their artistic endeavours on a larger canvas. In search of conviviality, and likeminded contemporaries, Robert joined the small membership of the Gaelic Society, or ‘Club of True Highlanders’. This group had been founded in 1830 as an exclusive network for Gaelic speakers, promoting Highland culture as well as functioning as a kind of mutual aid and assistance society. Many members of this group seem to have been emotionally inclined towards Jacobitism, and certainly, McIan was amongst them. Indeed, his identification with the deposed Stuart dynasty reached faintly ludicrous heights with an affectionate encounter with the ‘Sobieski Stuarts’. These eccentric brothers made grand and utterly fanciful claims to be direct descendants of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and consequently, members of the Scots and Polish royal families. Seemingly overcome with emotion by a visit by these charlatans, McIan was said to have ‘dropped to his knees and kissed the hand’ of one of them.(4)  Another significant connection made amid this tartan swathed milieu was that of his future collaborator, Aberdeen born journalist, James Logan. Hard drinking and combative, Logan suffered the after-effects of a traumatic head injury.

While Robert frequently appeared on stage in London throughout the 1830s in his guise as a heroic Highlander, his second career as a visual artist was developing. One of his first commissions was to illustrate an edition of ballads by his friend, the art critic and journalist Samuel Carter Hall. Hall seems to have been yet another colourful and difficult character, whose abrasiveness was to some extent mitigated by his more agreeable Irish wife, Anna Maria, who by profession was also a writer. It was also during this period that McIan began to exhibit paintings, often alongside those created by Fanny. These were concerned with Scottish folklore. His 1838 painting, ‘Sir Tristrem’ depicted a fantastical scene from the thirteenth century legend of Thomas the Rhymer, a native of the Scottish Borders who according to legend, sojourned in fairyland. Similarly, some of his creations for Carter Hall’s Book of Ballads showed the legend of Lord Soulis, a medieval nobleman who was claimed in legend to have been boiled alive for conspiring against Robert I. It is apparent that in this stage of his career Robert McIan’s visual output was a part of the early nineteenth century craze for medievalism. Primarily, this should be understood as a response by members of social elites to shelter in the past from trends they understood as threatening and frightening, notably the growth of popular democracy at home and revolutions overseas.

The idea of medievalism exerted, as Ian Anstruther memorably explained, ‘extraordinary force and hypnotic power’ upon its adherents.(5) Medievalism was not only romantic (in that it incorporated heroic and legends and lore) but it could often be quite reactionary, harking back to a feudal society which could be imagined as comfortingly hierarchical. This was manifest in phenomena ranging from huge building projects by wealthy individuals, the adoption of pseudo-medieval surnames, to a revival of interest in heraldry. In Scotland, medievalism reached its most potent (yet also somewhat farcical) flowering in the form of the Eglinton Tournament, an eye wateringly costly aristocratic pageant held on the Ayrshire estate of a wealthy dilettante, Archibald Montgomerie, the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, which was notoriously inundated by heavy rain. Appropriately enough, Robert McIan personally took part in the Eglinton Tournament in the persona of a jester. His recruitment was undoubtedly the result of his renown as a stage Scotsman, however, his appearance was not considered a success. Anstruther remarked that: ‘riding a donkey, and dressed in a cap and bells, he jogged about and made some feeble jokes. But, like many people of the same profession, without a script he was just a bore, and nobody thought him amusing’.(6) However, for McIan, playing jester to the aristocracy was- as Antonia Fraser noted- a case of art imitating life.(7) And wet days in Ayrshire have surely deflated less ebullient personalities.
 

Thomas Hodgson's engraving of a joust at the Eglington Tournament, between the Knight of the Red Rose and the Lord of the Tournament. Note McIan the jester on the far left.

By the early 1840s, the McIans were well-established members of a literary and artistic scene based in London. One way in which this was apparent was through Robert and Fanny’s friendship with the author, Charles Dickens. It is unclear how they initially made his acquaintance, but in the summer of 1841, Dickens was sufficiently familiar with Robert McIan to both call upon him when in Edinburgh (McIan was on tour with a production of the ‘Twa Drovers’) and to visit the theatre incognito to witness McIan’s acting. Subsequently, Fanny McIan produced an illustration of a scene from Dicken’s novel, the Old Curiosity Shop (depicting the tragic death of a child). Dickens appears to have been much affected by this image, which was hung in a prominent position in his home, Gad’s Hill. It was also through Dickens that Robert McIan encountered his contemporary, Edwin Landseer, also an artist closely involved with the production of romantic images of Scotland. Indeed, in 1843 Landseer dined at Dickens’s home in the company of the McIans.(8) He also features in the coda of a story which was related by Dicken’s daughter, Kate Perugini. The plot of this story centred upon how McIan (recalled by Perugini as a ‘wild highlander’ whom, as a child, she held in ‘secret dread’) presented Dickens with a live eagle as a token of esteem. Unsurprisingly, the eagle did not adapt well to life in captivity in London, refused to eat, and eventually, Landseer relieved Dickens of this exotic and troublesome present.(9)
 

Charles Dickens in 1842, when he and McIan were closest. 

In 1842 Fanny McIan joined the select group of women who held senior professional occupations in mid-nineteenth century England, when she was appointed Superintendent of the Female School of Design. This was a government initiative intended to teach art and design to small numbers of young women in London in order to stimulate the creative industries and to teach skills in order to support professional careers. During Fanny McIan’s tenure, the Female School of Design became embroiled in moral controversy over the contentious issue of whether women should be allowed to sketch the nude from life. However, it ultimately prevailed, and it may be surmised that Fanny’s income from teaching assisted her husband in his creative endeavours. 

From 1841 Robert McIan began work with his friend, Logan, on the huge artistic project which would become his enduring creative legacy, Clans of the Scottish Highlands. While McIan’s earlier visual work had drawn upon medievalism, and drew inspiration from the works of Sir Walter Scott, ‘Clans’ directly responded and contributed to an even more influential trend in cultural production: romantic Highlandism. This was not a novel development in the 1840s: the visit of the obese and capricious George IV to Edinburgh in 1822 had resulted in an outpouring of ‘tartanry’. But during the early reign on his niece, Victoria, and her husband, ‘tartanry’ enjoyed a revival. The royal couple were attracted to dominant ideas about the innate social conservatism of ‘traditional’ societies such as that believed to exist in the Highlands, were beguiled by romantic landscapes and the seductive associations of these places with vigorous outdoor pastimes. They could, according to McIan’s collaborator, James Logan: ‘unbend the bow of royal etiquette amid the quietness of mountain retreat, breaking the monotony of seclusion by healthful pursuits peculiar to Highland life, deriving entertainment from the athletic and convivial performances of their Gaelic subjects’.(10) And as the historian, T.C Smout has explained, the artistic patronage of the royal couple was a major force behind the creation of a ‘new image of the Scottish Highlands, one far removed from the realities of rural crisis and economic collapse: a fusion of blood sports and wild romance.’(11) Indeed, the apex of Robert McIan’s career was the direct consequence of royal enthusiasm: in 1847 he was called aboard the royal yacht at Fort William for an audience on its deck with Queen Victoria, an event which was greeted with cheers from the assembled crowd for the ‘Queen and the Painter’!

By any stretch of the imagination, Clans of the Scottish Highlands was a large and ambitious project. In the form of large coloured lithographs, it depicted a wide range of historic costumes associated with historic kindreds in the Highlands. Eventually, there were twenty-four bound volumes, each featuring detailed lithographs and accompanied by texts composed by Logan. These set out to describe the ‘dress, tartans, arms, armorial insignia and social occupations’ of the various clans which were featured. The book appears to have been thoroughly researched, which can be expected to have been a demanding undertaking. Robert visited representatives of each clan before composing his pictures of the costumes, additionally sketching notable memorabilia that they held (supplemented by items from his own collection on weapons, which, despite the previously mentioned concerns of a colleague as to safety) McIan wielded on stage when playing his various highland roles. Notably, the book included female as well as male costume, something the authors were particularly satisfied to have included. These included depictions of the wearing of the arisaid, described by Morse as a voluminous garment which a woman threw over her head.(12) Testifying both to elite fascination with Highlandism and McIan’s talent for self-promotion, the project was supported by an impressive list of subscribers. This was headed by the royal couple themselves, other members of the Hanoverian royal family, and Louis Philippe, King of the French. Then came a roll call of various Scottish noblemen and clan chiefs, followed by a lengthily list of further worthies, including Dickens.

 The project required extensive research trips to the Highlands, in which McIan would have revelled. He appears to have had a special affinity for mountain landscapes, drew inspiration from immersion in nature, and imagined geographies as a kind of direct link to the past. Accompanying him on a Highland tour, Samuel Carter Hall recounted ‘rashly’ following McIan across rough terrain to the scene of the infamous Massacre of Glencoe. ‘It was nothing for him to run, and to scramble in his kilt… for three hours I walked and ran, climbed ascents and waded through water courses’ until they reached the reputed location, where ‘he grew absolutely wild with excitement, and heaped curses upon the doomed heads of the murderers, as earnest and bitter as if they had been there’.(13) According to Antonia Fraser, Robert would pass the days visiting, sketching, holding forth… and singing in the taverns at night.(14) When not bounding through rivers, he was to be found peering into them in search of salmon. This fascination with landscape and nature found a creative outlet in McIan and Logan’s next project, Highlanders at Home. This illustrated and described a succession of traditional pastimes and occupations, for example, the activities of cattle drovers and deer stalkers. Explaining the premise of the project, Logan asserted that ‘much still remained of the system of antiquated life characteristic of those who have not advanced beyond the primitive state in which alpine situations is long retained by the difficulty of access to their secluded homes.’(15)
 

An illustration from Highlanders at Home

Although he illustrated a book of songs and poetry in 1846, Elizabeth Ogilvy’s Highland Minstrelsy, McIan’s work was now becoming focused upon military themes, further building upon his fascination with costume. In the early 1850s he received a lucrative commission from Lieutenant Colonel Lauderdale Maule, a younger brother of the Earl of Panmure, to depict the regiment Maule commanded, the 79^th Cameron Highlanders, just prior to their involvement in the Crimean War. A martinet obsessed with military fashion, at one point the pay of his soldiers had been diverted into paying for new items of dress to the extent that they received only a penny a day.(16) McIan’s paintings of these soldiers at their base at Edinburgh Castle were larger and more technically complex than his earlier works, and it was likely that they represented a determined effort on his part to be regarded as a ‘serious’ artist. However, this was not to be. Around the time of the outbreak of the Crimean War, McIan experienced the onset of serious mental illness, the exact nature of which is unknown. A surviving photograph of him, dated 1854, depicts an older and world-wearied figure, still sporting his familiar ‘walrus’ moustache, dressed sombrely in conventional mid-Victorian jacket and waistcoat. His biographer conjectures that he was adversely affected by the escalating death toll of the war in Crimea, which had come to a number of his friends. McIan was, she opined, ‘a man of very strong emotions, and the uncertainties of artistic and theatrical life must have exhausted him physically and mentally, much as they were later to exhaust Landseer.’(17) After several years of serious illness, he died at his London home on the 13^th of December 1856, at the comparatively young age of 51. He was survived by many years by his wife and creative partner, who had cared for him throughout his final illness. Fanny McIan died aged over eighty in 1897.
 

A wood engraving depicting the wounded during the Crimean War. 

Robert McIan was, according to one obituarist, ‘a warm-hearted and honourable man, highly esteemed by all those who knew him. Both as an actor and a painter he was held in respect by his brethren, for he pursued both arts with enthusiasm’.(18) It could be argued that reports of McIan’s excitable nature and eccentric habits be interpreted as suggesting that he suffered from an unknown illness, perhaps syphilis, which resulted in his premature death. Similar levels of mystery surround his origins and early life, in particular his duel identity as Robert Jones. Yet McIan was an individual who achieved remarkable social and professional success, ably supported by his talented wife. Ultimately, there is a limit to how much can be discovered about his life as he left no memoirs and many accounts of him were written by close friends or were rather superficial in nature. McIan’s legacy has also been overshadowed by his lithographs for Clans of the Scottish Highlands, which have enjoyed a cultural afterlife of which he would surely be astounded.

(1) T.C Smout, ‘Landseer’s Highlands’, Richard Ormond, The Monarch of the Glen (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2005) 13.
(2) Antonia Fraser, ‘Introduction’, R.R McIan and James Logan, The Clans of the Scottish Highlands (London; Pan Books, 1980 Edition) v.
(3) Belinda Morse, A Woman of Design, A Man of Passion: The Pioneering McIans (Lewes: The Book Guild, 2001) 12-13.
(4) Morse, Pioneering McIans, 29.
(5) Ian Anstruther, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament, 1839 (London: Wilmer Brothers, 1963) 66.
(6) Anstruther, Eglinton Tournament, 203.
(7) Antonia Fraser, ‘Introduction’ in McIan and Logan, The Clans, vi.
(8) Morse, Pioneering McIans, 75-77, 94-95. 
(9) Morse, Pioneering McIans, 75-77, 94-95. 
(10) Antonia Fraser, ‘Introduction’ in McIan and Logan, The Clans, v.
(11) Smout, ‘Landseer’s Highlands’ in Ormond, Monarch of the Glen, 13-14
(12) Morse, Pioneering McIans, 121.
(13) Morse, Pioneering McIans, 121.
(14) Fraser, ‘Introduction’ in McIan and Logan, The Clans, vii
(15) James Logan, ‘Introduction’ in R.R McIan, McIan’s Highlanders at Home (London: Ackerman and Co, 1848) 15
(16) Morse, Pioneering McIans, 242.
(17) Morse, Pioneering McIans, 238.
(18) Morse, Pioneering McIans, 249.