Visions of Scottishness

[OC Richard]

Anyone interested in reading about these putative Sobieski Brothers (or Hay-Allan Brothers or whatever) and their impact on tartans should pick up

Scotland's Forged Tartans

by

Donald Stewart and J Charles Thompson

Paul Harris Publishing Edinburgh

The amount of harm these fakers did to Scotland's tartans is tremendous.

Not only did they invent a large number of ugly tartans, they also lifted some very lovely traditional tartans and changed the design around a bit, their changes always making the tartans both more simple, and clumsy.

In nearly every case the tartan weavers, to this day, have followed their simplifications of traditional designs rather than going back to early pattern books for the real designs.

Their approach to tartan design was cretinous.

They knew nothing about weaving or tartan design and misunderstood the whole idea of tartans, thinking that tartans were analogous to heraldry.

Therefore, their simple-minded and clumsy designs consisted of two, three, or four equal stripes. Traditional tartans of the day were far more complex and had lovely proportions.

Here's the Sobieski-Stuart-Stolberg-Hay-Allan tartan spotter's guide:

Their designs, as tartan experts have pointed out, were obviously designed on the drawing-board and not on the loom.

Their most basic was two equal stripes, then three, then (can you imagine it!) FOUR equal stripes! Thier head must have just about burst when they designed tartans of such daring complexity.







What traditional tartans looked like: (some pre-1745 tartans)









An example of how a clumsy Hay-Allan version replaced the much nicer traditional version is Fraser. Logan (1831) gives a nice tradtional-looking design, which the Hay-Allans simplified into one of their several four-equal-stripe designs. The weavers have used the Hay-Allan design over the real one ever since.

[creagdhubh]

Very interesting Richard and you are quite right. Thanks for sharing.