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Ailsa Craig is an island off the southwest coast of Scotland, at the entrance to the Firth of Clyde; though only about a mile across, it is steep, almost conical in shape, and rises to over a thousand feet. The view here is looking west and north from the mainland, with the Isle of Arran on the horizon to the right and Kintyre to the left. Scott painted it while staying at Penkill Castle, a few miles inland from Girvan, in July 1860. There he was the guest of Alice Boyd, whom he had met in the previous year, and with whom he was to have an intimate friendship for the rest of his life. From this time on he would regularly spend his summers at Penkill, where he painted pictures and murals, wrote poems, and entertained artistic and literary friends such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He died there in 1890 and was buried in the local church.

Scott had moved in Pre-Raphaelite circles since the earliest days of the movement, and Ailsa Craig is a thorough and wholehearted essay in Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting, a tribute particularly to William Holman Hunt's densely symbolic early landscape Our English Coasts, 1852 (Strayed Sheep) (1852; Tate Gallery). In their approach to landscape the Pre-Raphaelites tried to rid their minds of all preconceptions about natural beauty, especially theories of the "ideal" and the "picturesque" handed down from the eighteenth century. For them the purpose of art was neither to order nature so as to please the eye; nor to invest it with human feelings; nor to capture its fleeting effects in an "impression." They tried instead to document its appearance, to provide the viewer with as much information about the given place as possible. Typically, Scott chose a time of day for his scene, late afternoon, at which the best light fell on his foreground. He painted everything on the spot, from direct observation, in crisp, all-over detail, and with little or no concession to the limitations of human eyesight. The work is an assemblage of facts to be examined like specimens in a glass display case, and every bright, ringing detail is in focus at the same time.

The Pre-Raphaelites aspired to make art more like science, and Scott's foreground shows a characteristic keenness to identify botanical species. He gives us no generic, fill-in vegetation, but plant portraits: yellow irises, thistles, and so on. He chose a place to paint whose geology shows through clearly, and provides everything we might wish to know on this subject too, resisting all temptation to improve on nature's own designs. As a result, there is a sense of the bending, moulding, wearing down, and crumbling of rock-the operation of great forces over great periods of time. We find ourselves wondering how and in what far-distant epoch Ailsa Craig was formed. The sheep tracks following the contours of the land resemble undulating strata; the scattered boulders and pebbles at the beach remind us of the eroding power of the sea. Geology was a key issue for the Victorians, fascinated as they were by its latest findings, troubled as they were by the threat these posed to traditional religious beliefs. In another great Pre-Raphaelite coastal landscape, William Dyce's Pegwell Bay (1858-60; Tate Gallery), a comet sighted over some fossil-rich cliffs represents the vastnesses of space and time that modern science was opening up; in Our English Coasts, 1852 (Strayed Sheep), Hunt shows sheep near a cliff edge to represent the Christian flock in peril; and in Ailsa Craig, his Scottish coast-a landscape of fact and geology crossed by sheep-Scott may well have intended resonances of a similar kind.

Malcolm Warner
Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 160, no. 65, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)