Allan M'Aulay

Horace Vernet's Allan M'Aulay of 1823 depicts a character from Scott's Legend of Montrose — the Highland seer and berserker warrior — in the medieval Scottish setting that Scott's fiction had made a staple of Romantic visual culture. Vernet brought his military scene-painting expertise to Scottish Highland subjects with appropriate energy, the barbaric grandeur of the Highland warrior providing material that combined picturesque medieval history with the psychological extremity that Romantic painters sought in their literary sources.

Vernet renders the Highland warrior with characteristic precision in costume and weaponry. The dramatic pose against a wild landscape setting captures the Romantic ideal of the noble savage from Scott's novels.