A HIGHLAND museum at the heart of Jacobite history is celebrating two new additions to its collection as it marks a century since first opening its doors.
The West Highland Museum in Fort William has secured an original portrait of Jacobite heroine Flora MacDonald and a rare 18th-century Inverness-made flintlock pistol, both of which will take pride of place in its Jacobite gallery.
The new acquisitions mark 100 years since the museum’s first Jacobite exhibition, held in the very region where Prince Charles Edward Stuart launched his bid to reclaim the British throne for his family.
MacDonald, a young woman from Uist, helped Bonnie Prince Charlie sail to the Isle of Skye after the uprising was quashed by British forces in 1746. MacDonald was imprisoned in the Tower of London for a few years before moving to the United States, where her husband and sons fought in the Revolutionary War.
Museum curator Vanessa Martin said the connection between the collection and its Highland setting remains deeply meaningful.
“We do regard ourselves as the cradle of the 1745 Rising,” she said. “The rising began here in Glenfinnan, and Bonnie Prince Charlie was on the run here after Culloden. He left Lochaber when he fled to France, taking with him Cameron of Lochiel, who was injured at the battle. He was, of course, the local laird here and died in exile in 1747. So everything is very much connected to the area.”
The newly acquired 1829 portrait miniature of Flora MacDonald, painted in watercolour on ivory by G. Murray, was first shown at the 1888 Stuart Exhibition in London. Despite holding 16 objects connected to MacDonald, the museum had never before owned an original image of her.
“Although we have 16 objects of material culture attributed to the Jacobite heroine Flora MacDonald, we did not have an original portrait of her,” Martin explained. “This lovely miniature will add context to our existing collection as visitors will now be able to see an image of Flora alongside the objects believed once to have belonged to her.”
The museum also announced the acquisition of a rare, decorated flintlock all-metal scroll butt belt pistol, made in Inverness by gunsmith Alexander Cameron in the early 1700s.
“Although the museum has one of the best Jacobite collections in Scotland, we do not have a pistol on display in our Jacobite gallery,” Martin said. “This fills a significant gap — especially as the focus of Jacobitism in Lochaber was the 1745 military campaign.”
Support for the acquisitions came from the Art Fund, National Fund for Acquisitions, E.A. Cameron, and Michael Foxley, whose contributions helped secure the artefacts for the museum’s centenary year.
Founded in the early 1920s by Victor Hodgson, an Englishman captivated by Highland history, the West Highland Museum began as a collection of crofting artefacts before growing into one of Scotland’s most significant repositories of Jacobite heritage. Among its treasures is the famed anamorphic “secret portrait” of Bonnie Prince Charlie — a hidden likeness of the prince revealed only when viewed through a glass cylinder, once used by Jacobite supporters to toast their “King Over the Water” in secret.
