In 1780, at the time this portrait was painted, it was forbidden to wear Scottish tartan in England unless one was serving in the British military. Scotsman Hugh Montgomerie is portrayed here commanding a British battalion, wearing traditional attire; his clan tartan reflects at once his Scottish heritage and the recent military expansion of the British Empire into the Scottish Isles following the 1746 Battle of Culloden. Montgomerie stands in the victorious classical pose of the Apollo Belvedere above a group of fallen Tsalagi (Cherokee) amid an ambush. However, the portrait does not tell the truth: Although Montgomerie fought for the British in the colonies, he did not take part in the battle depicted here, which occurred in 1760, twenty years prior to the execution of this painting. More significantly, the Cherokee did not capitulate in this battle as Copley’s painting suggests. A few weeks after Britain’s attack, the Cherokee prevailed and European troops retreated from the area.
Such images of conquest inevitably contribute to the erasure of those portrayed as the defeated, generating an assumption that once the depicted battle was lost, these groups or peoples disappeared. But a single flattering portrait–cum–history painting does not constitute abiding truth—the British went on to lose the American Revolutionary War, the Cherokee Nation would become the largest tribe in the territory known as the United States, and, as of this writing (2021), a significant political movement for independence from the United Kingdom persists in Scotland.
