Earliest use of brass-cantle sporrans?

**creagdhubh** · 14th July 12, 09:14 AM

Originally Posted by artificer

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Grammar and punctuation are our friends. Let's make sure to use them so our posts our intelligible to all.

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**georgeetta** · 14th July 12, 10:19 AM

yes, very sorry about that .
it's a public keyboard and I get delays ..
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**OC Richard** · 17th July 12, 03:26 AM

Originally Posted by figheadair

I The sporran is certainly fur and brass cantled but I'm not sure one can say with certainty that it's seal skin. It could equally be exotic cat of some sort.

Yes you're right there... I guess we need an expert on various furs to tell us just what Hugh Mongomerie's sporran is. I have seen sealskin sporrans that looked just like that, though, or at least they were being sold as sealskin.

BTW the cantle is silver, like the lace on his jacket and the rest of his accoutrements. The 77th Highlanders (Montgomerie's Highlanders) wore Dark Green facings and Silver lace, I am told.

I'm waiting for somebody to post an 18th century portrait of somebody wearing one of those semicircular brass cantle sporrans. I can't find one in any of my books.

**OC Richard** · 17th July 12, 03:38 AM

Originally Posted by M. A. C. Newsome

This one belongs to Sir Malcolm MacGregor of MacGregor, and if I recall correctly, the cantle is stamped with the date 1729.

It would be great if that could be verified.

Of course it's possible for an item to have a date on it which was added later. An example close to home is the wonderful pair of portraits I have hanging on my wall of my great-great grandparents painted in the 1880s. I had a pair of brass plaques engraved with their names and dates and put on the picture-frames.

Then there's the antique-looking set of pipes with the date 1409 carved on them, which pretty much everyone nowadays agrees is a 19th century phoney.

**georgeetta** · 17th July 12, 03:12 PM

18th century portraits ..there is a book I have called Bokk of Tartan ..not normal book of swatches ..mostly historical drawings of units by observers ..and many Officers ..usually of Gov't Units . I'll have a look .

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**Tam Piperson** · 2nd November 12, 06:47 PM

Here is a photograph from an illustration in a book showing various early metal cantled sporrans:

**eckersley** · 29th January 13, 03:22 PM

I would agree with the date at around 1725 and also attribute it to the uniform of the Black Watch.

**TheOfficialBren** · 29th January 13, 05:25 PM

This has been a fascinating thread!

**eckersley** · 30th January 13, 12:56 AM

Originally Posted by OC Richard

I think I've seen the original too... if it was at The National Portrait Gallery, or one of the castles... I can't recall. But in photos it's quite clear that it's sealskin. Nothing else looks remotely like mottled grey sealskin.

Anyhow here's an 18th century portrait which quite clearly shows sealskin, and I've seen the original many times, because it's here in Los Angeles! Yes the one in The National Museums Scotland is an unsigned copy, while the one in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) it the signed and dated original. (The copy is somewhat different, see the seperate thread "A Tale of Two Paintings".)

Here's the original, signed J. S. Copley 1780

**eckersley** · 30th January 13, 01:19 AM

Originally Posted by OC Richard

I think I've seen the original too... if it was at The National Portrait Gallery, or one of the castles... I can't recall. But in photos it's quite clear that it's sealskin. Nothing else looks remotely like mottled grey sealskin.

Anyhow here's an 18th century portrait which quite clearly shows sealskin, and I've seen the original many times, because it's here in Los Angeles! Yes the one in The National Museums Scotland is an unsigned copy, while the one in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) it the signed and dated original. (The copy is somewhat different, see the seperate thread "A Tale of Two Paintings".)

Here's the original, signed J. S. Copley 1780

Albeit just slightly off topic, but as this original rarely sees the light of day, I would like to mention how wonderful it is to see so clearly the double thickness of his tartan in this, the original, portrait. With the exception of the MacIan miniatures, in most portraits where one could see, one sees the belted plaid is worn such that the fabric has clearly two selvages, as is the case here too and can be noticed on the wearer's left where the tartan is carried up over the shoulder. This doubling of the tartan fabric can be seen in the Piper for the Grants (to his right), the famous Lord Mungo (on the lowest edge of his kilt) and a number of others. Most people today seem to take a seven yard double-width piece of tartan and pleat the entire fabric until they have shortened it to a manageable length. However, from the paintings, this one being another example, and from personal experience, the seven or so yards appear to have been doubled back upon themselves to leave a length of only three-and-a-half yards or so of double-width cloth. This is then pleated in the usual way. This also supports the lack of the possibility to have a tie string to keep or re-do the pleats in the rear, as the tie string would need to be threaded though both thicknesses of the cloth. It seems to me that the plaid underwent such development as to remove the double-width aspect of it (I have not yet found paintings of belted plaids with seams indicating two lengths of single-width tartan sewn lengthwise together but came across a short length of Black Watch on sale in an antique shop in New York where that was the case), and that the lower "half" of the plaid, rather than being folded back upon itself as had been done, was pleated along its seven or more yard length, then ultimately to have its pleats sewn down. The double fringe on so many modern short kilts perhaps reflects this older belted plaid tradition of folding the tartan back upon itself to shorten the cloth to an actually manageable length of three-and-a-half yards.

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