Picturesque Gatherings of the Scottish Highlanders at Home, on the Heath, the River, and the Loch. A series of highly interesting plates, representing picturesque groups engaged in their social employment, their sports, and pastimes. From original paintings made expressly for this work.

London: Ackermann and Co, 1848. MCIAN, R.R.; ACKERMANN, Rudolph. Complete with Twenty-four Hand-Colored Lithographic Plates

MCIAN, R.R., [illustrator]. ACKERMANN, Rudolph. LOGAN, James. Picturesque Gatherings of the Scottish Highlanders at Home, on the Heath, the. River, and the Loch. A series of highly interesting plates, representing picturesque groups engaged in their social employment, their sports, and pastimes. From original paintings made expressly for this work. London: Ackermann and Co., 1848.

Full Description:

MCIAN, R.R., [illustrator]. LOGAN, James. Picturesque Gatherings of the Scottish Highlanders at Home, (truncated) on the Heath, the River, and the Loch. A series of highly interesting plates, representing picturesque groups engaged in their social employment, their sports, and pastimes. From original paintings made expressly for this work. London: Ackermann and Co., 1848.

First edition. Folio (19 1/2 x 12 7/8 inches; 490 x 326 mm). viii, 48 pp. Complete with twenty-four highly finished hand-colored lithograph plates, heightened with gum arabic. Tissue guards. Plate 23 and it's accompanying text leaf bound at the end, after plate 24 and it's text leaf.

Beautifully bound by Bayntun-Riviere in full green morocco. Boards double ruled in gilt. With gilt corner devices of thistles, with purple moroco onlay. Spine stamped and lettered in gilt with the same thistle motif and purple onlay. Gilt dentelles. All edges gilt. Top edge gilt. Marbled endpapers. Previous owner's bookplate on front free endpaper. Title-page and final text leaf with reinforcement along inner margin. Some plates trimmed close at fore-edge, sometime just barely touching imprint. A very minor amount of foxing to a few text leaves and tissue guards, but plates very clean. A very good copy in a beautiful binding.

"Born around 1803, [McIan] 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.’ 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 final major literary project was a further collaboration with James Logan. This was intended to build upon the previous success of 'Clans of the Scottish Highlands,' but was aimed at a more popular, although still affluent readership. A folio, it was a significantly smaller book and did not stretch to multiple volumes. It consists of a substantial text by Logan upon the subject of traditional lifestyles and customs to be found in the Scottish Highlands, which the author correctly asserted were being eroded by contact with cultural and technological change in the wider British world. McIan’s twenty-[four] illustrations showed groups of Highlanders taking part in past-times which a wider audience would have found ‘picturesque’ such as spearing salmon, fording rivers, carding wool and butchering the carcass of a stag. Rather than depictions of actual scenes drawn from life, they are in fact cultural productions with a very specific ideological intent. They were intended to show a vision of Highlanders as a people, who through their enforced remoteness were able to symbolise ideas about more authentic modes of existence." (RRMcIan dot com).

HBS 69385.

$4,500. (Inventory #: 69385)