As regulars here well know, I'm something of the Defender of the Faith when it comes to Kenneth MacLeay's watercolour portraits in The Highlanders Of Scotland.
I've stated from time to time that one of the things that makes the illustrations ring so true to me is that I've handled original examples of a large number of the things illustrated, and time and again I marvel at MacLeay's attention to detail, how many subtle things he gets right.
A while back I took closeup photos of all the sporrans shown in HOS and posted them here. I thought I'd post a few of these side by side with photos of actual sporrans demonstrating similar styles. I say 'similar' not identical, because there was obviously much more variety in sporran design in the 1860s than there was in the c1920-c1970 period that for many of us defines 'traditional Highland dress'.
It's an oddity in HOS that you see certain sporran styles over and over; not identical repetition but variations on a theme. On the other hand there are quite a few unique or at least rare designs to be seen too.
One thing seen over and over is the pentagonal cantle, in various proportions, with and without the angled bits protruding from each side of the top. This style survives today; it's one of the nice 'retro' things about the uniform of The Atholl Highlanders.
Here's a vintage example and one of the numerous HOS examples
Another common HOS style is a plain stitched leather cantle. This survived in the Army until fairly recently in the ORs' sporrans of The Black Watch and The Cameron Highlanders. Here's a Cameron sporran and a couple of the many HOS equivalents
Here's an old cantle shape not seen nowadays
Limit 10 images... more to come on followup posts.
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