Selecting the “right” tartan version

[OC Richard]

Excellent article as always Peter!

Staying with the major commercial offerings, as best I can understand the modern colours are the chemical-dye versions of the traditional colours, though they went overboard with the vividness and/or darkness of the colours. Red is a pure scarlet-red while green and blue can be quite dark.

The colour-scheme now called ancient colours makes red a red-orange while green and blue are pastels. Catalogues from the 1930s call the scheme "vegetable colourings" and claim they reproduce how tartans looked prior to the invention of chemical dyes. One gets the sense that the vegetable colourings scheme was recent and popular.

The earliest suggestion I've seen of vegetable colourings is in this 1909 catalogue illustration:



Here's the "story" of D C Dalgliesh's introduction of the colour-scheme they called "reproduction" colours. And quite a story it is!



Since this invaluable relic of the '45 has never come to light, the above story has the ring of a marketing scheme.

The historian in me rejects the statement about the relic telling us what tartan was like "in 1745 and before" due to

1) there was no systematic excavation so the 1745 date is mere supposition

2) evidence from one point in time can only tell us about that period; inferring that the same situation existed prior to that period is irresponsible.

In any case Dalgliesh's new "reproduction" colour-scheme, introduced AFAIK in the late 1940s, red is muted, green is brown, and blue is grey.

Lochcarron copied it wholesale and dubbed it weathered colours.

Then there's House Of Edgar's muted colours in which red is claret, green is olive, and blue is a lovely cobalt.

Here's MacDonald in all four of these colour schemes



About Hamilton, it's one of several three-equal-stripe tartans introduced by the Allen brothers in their book Vestiarium Scoticum, here are four of them: