page_title: Ossian
section_title: Britain, Germany and Scandinavia
hierarchical_section_title: Ossian / In art / Britain, Germany and Scandinavia
context_page_description: Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson from 1760. Macpherson claimed to have collected word-of-mouth material in Scottish Gaelic, said to be from ancient sources, and that the work was his translation of that material. Ossian is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a legendary bard who is a character in Irish mythology. Contemporary critics were divided in their view of the work's authenticity, but the consensus since is that Macpherson framed the poems himself, based on old folk tales he had collected.
  The work was internationally popular, translated into all the literary languages of Europe and was highly influential both in the development of the Romantic movement and the Gaelic revival. "The contest over the authenticity of Macpherson's pseudo-Gaelic productions," Curley asserts, "became a seismograph of the fragile unity within restive diversity of imperial Great Britain in the age of Johnson." Macpherson's fame was crowned by his burial among the literary giants in Westminster Abbey. W.P.
context_section_description: British artists began to depict the Ossian poems early on, with the first major work a cycle of paintings decorating the ceiling the "Grand Hall" of Penicuik House in Midlothian, built by Sir James Clerk, who commissioned the paintings in 1772.  These were by the Scottish painter Alexander Runciman and lost when the house burnt down in 1899, though drawings and etchings survive, and two pamphlets describing them were published in the 18th century. A subject from Ossian by Angelica Kauffman was shown in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1773, and Ossian was depicted in Elysium, part of the Irish painter James Barry's magnum opus decorating the Royal Society of Arts, at the Adelphi Buildings in London (still in situ).
  Works on paper by Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman have survived, though the Ossianic landscapes by George Augustus Wallis, which the Ossian fan August Wilhelm Schlegel praised in a letter to Goethe, seem to have been lost, as has a picture by J.M.W. Turner exhibited in 1802.  Henry Singleton exhibited paintings, some of which were engraved and used in editions of the poems.
  A fragment by Novalis, written in 1789, refers to Ossian as an inspired, holy and poetical singer.
  The Danish painter Nicolai Abildgaard, Director of the Copenhagen Academy from 1789, painted several scenes from Ossian, as did his pupils including Asmus Jacob Carstens. His friend Joseph Anton Koch painted a number of subjects, and two large series of illustrations for the poems, which never got properly into print; like many Ossianic works by Wallis, Carstens, Krafft and others, some of these were painted in Rome, perhaps not the best place to evoke the dim northern light of the poems. In Germany the request in 1804 to produce some drawings as illustrations so excited Philipp Otto Runge that he planned a series of 100, far more than asked for, in a style heavily influenced by the linear illustrations of John Flaxman; these remain as drawings only. Many other German works are recorded, some as late as the 1840s; word of the British scepticism over the Ossian poems was slow to penetrate the continent, or considered irrelevant.
caption: Fingal Sees the Ghosts of His Ancestors in the Moonlight, Nicolai Abildgaard, 1778
exif: {"Image Copyright": "Public Domain"}