6 - Borders Bard

Summary

This chapter seeks to locate George IV’s fleeting visit to Edinburgh in what cultural historian Peter de Bolla has described as the domain of the scopic. It does so by focusing on the visual culture of the visit as witnessed in the production of images – both official and unofficial – by various artists, including David Wilkie, John Wilson Ewbank and William Home Lizars. This chapter argues that a multiplicity of visual experiences was proffered by the King’s visit to Edinburgh. Not only in the production of traditional art historical media like paintings, engravings and sculpture, but also in the ways in which the city itself in terms of its body politic, its architectural embellishments (‘the Athens of the North’) and its topographical landscape were described as being displayed to the King in a sequence of staged tableaux. He, in turn, is described as being revealed to the gawping gaze of his Scottish subjects.