Looking Down Glencoe
About this artwork
The rise of tourism as a popular pastime in the nineteenth century and Sir Walter Scott’s novels about the romantic past of Scotland generated public interest in Highland scenery for which the photographic industry readily catered. The Aberdeen-based photographer George Washington Wilson had an acute sense of what constituted a popular view. He took enormous care in finding and composing self-contained scenes and it was the originality of his imagery, capturing effects of nature never seen before, that so fascinated his contemporaries. This view looks down through Glencoe which was the scene of the 1692 massacre, the story of which had been romanticised in Victorian literature, such as Scott’s ‘The Highland Widow’.
Updated before 2020
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artist:George Washington Wilson (1823 - 1893) Scottish
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title:Looking Down Glencoe
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date created:About 1860
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materials:Albumen print
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measurements:10.10 x 15.20 cm
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object type:
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accession number:PGP 71.75
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gallery:
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artwork photographed by:Antonia Reeve
George Washington Wilson
George Washington Wilson
A hugely successful businessman, George Washington Wilson had left home at twelve to be a carpenter and subsequently trained as a portrait painter before turning to photography in 1853. By the 1860s he owned printing works in Aberdeen that produced thousands of prints with views from all over...