An Exile of the '45

An Exile of the '45, undated and in Dundee Art Galleries and Museums, draws on the Jacobite rising of 1745 — the failed attempt to restore the Stuart dynasty under Bonnie Prince Charlie — a subject that held persistent romantic appeal for Victorian and Edwardian artists. The Jacobite exile became a stock figure of Romantic imagination: loyal, dispossessed, wandering the Highlands or European courts in memory of a lost cause. Dundee's Scottish collection context gives the painting particular local resonance, as Scotland was the primary theatre of the rising and its subsequent repression. Rivière approached the subject through his characteristic combination of careful figure painting and an atmospheric landscape setting.

The period setting would require careful attention to mid-eighteenth-century costume and to the specific Highland or European landscape that served as the exile's environment. Rivière's palette for historical subjects tended toward warm, nostalgic ochres and browns that reinforced the elegiac mood of the Jacobite theme.