Centre for Scottish Studies at SFU Continues with Lecture Series
VANCOUVER - Duncan Macmillan will be the next speaker at the SFU Scottish Enlightenment and Emigration Series sponsored by the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University.
He will speak on the topic: The Study of Human Nature: Portraiture in the Scottish Enlightenment on March 16 at 8 PM at the SFU Harbour Centre Campus. The lecture is free. To register, call (604) 291-5100.
Duncan Macmillan is Professor Emeritus of the History of Scottish Art, Edinburgh University; director of the innovative Talbot Rice Gallery; and art critic for The Scotsman.
His books include Painting in Scotland:The Golden Age 1707-1842 (1986) and Scottish Art 1460-1990 (Scottish Book of the year 1991; enlarged, updated, and reissued, 2000). He was recently awarded the Henry Duncan Prize by the Royal Society of Edinburgh for his contribution to Scottish historical writing, and the Saltire Society’s Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun prize for his contribution to Scottish life.
His lecture will focus primarily on Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn, two of the greatest portrait painters of the Eighteenth Century. They recorded in memorable images people who made the Enlightenment, both great and small, men and women alike.
But the significance of their work lies in more than providing a record. The central study Enlightenment empiricism was human nature, and that is the study of portraiture. Sight is the painter’s sense, and the study of perception is central to Enlightenment thought. The painters explored, as the philosophers did, both the nature of perception and the difficulties surrounding it, in relation to portrayal of human personality.
Also, the painters, like the philosophers, saw the individual not as isolated, but as framed by society, even shaped by it. Their art is profoundly social, and provides a unique insight in what it is that makes the Scottish Enlightenment so important and so continually fascinating.
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