Burns and Highland Mary

Robert Burns (1759-1796), the celebrated Scottish poet, known as the 'Ploughman Poet' and 'Bard of Ayrshire', was born in 1759 into a farming family in Alloway. When he met Highland Mary he was running a farm with his brother Gilbert at Mossgiel, near Mauchline. This painting, one of two paintings purchased by the Trustees of the Hamilton Bequest from the collection of Lady Arrol in March 1928, imagines Burns' last meeting with Highland Mary before her early death.

'Highland Mary' was Margaret ('Mary') Campbell (1763-86), born near Dunoon on the Cowal Peninsula in Argyll. In 1785, she went to Ayrshire where she became a nursemaid in the house of Burns' friend Gavin Hamilton in Mauchline. Burns and Campbell had a brief relationship in April-May 1786, Burns feeling deserted by his common-law wife Jean Armour, who had been sent by family to Paisley. Burns dedicated the poems 'The Highland Lassie O', 'Highland Mary' and 'To Mary in Heaven' to Campbell. In 'The Highland Lassie O' he writes: 'She has my heart, she has my hand. / By sacred truth and honour's band! / Till the mortal stroke shall lay me low, / I'm thine, my Highland lassie, O.'

Burns and Campbell apparently exchanged Bibles and made matrimonial vows on the banks of the River Ayr in May 1786. Burns recalled: 'My Highland lassie was a warm-hearted charming young creature as ever blessed a man with generous love. After a pretty long tract of the most ardent reciprocal attachment we met by appointment, on the second Sunday of May, in a sequestered spot by the Banks of Ayr, where we spent the day in taking farewell, before she should embark for the West Highlands to arrange matters among her friends for our projected change of life.' In financial straits, Burns had accepted a job as bookkeeper on a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people in the West Indies and wanted Campbell to go with him, writing a song 'Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, And leave auld Scotia's shore?' However, Mary Campbell died at the age of 23, in October 1786, probably from typhus contracted while nursing her brother Robert. Burns' Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published to critical acclaim and he never did make the journey to Jamaica. However, the fact that Scotland's renowned bard considered working on a plantation where he would have been responsible for recording the purchases of enslaved African people, as well as their punishments and deaths, is shocking. Around 17,000 Scots emigrated to the Caribbean between 1750 and 1800. Campbell is buried in the Old West Kirk churchyard in Greenock. A statue of her by David Watson Stevenson was erected on Castle Hill in Dunoon in 1896.

Thomas Faed, who was fond of painting sentimental scenes of love, separation, departure and family loss, was particularly drawn to this subject. It certainly had popular appeal and several versions and replicas are known to exist. He shows the couple sitting together under a tree, Burns with a forget-me-not in his left hand, leaning in to Campbell, his right hand around her waist. Her downcast eyes and clasped hands suggest a certain demureness but her unbuttoned dress points to their physical relationship. Faed exhibited a painting of this subject at the Royal Academy in London in 1856 (no. 592). Ruskin described it as: 'Mr. Faed's best work this year; very lovely in its kind; and the distance, though conventional, well composed.'

Faed was born to a milling family in Girthon, near Gatehouse of Fleet in Galloway in 1826. His brothers John, James and George, and sister Susan were also artists. He studied at the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh from 1842 and in 1851 moved to London where he had a highly successful career painting scenes of Scottish

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Credit: Presented by the Trustees of the Hamilton Bequest, 1928