Clarissa Tan

A quietly stunning quest for Bonnie Prince Charlie

Plus: Jonathan Creek's charm is as strong as ever, but Hair should have stayed on the cutting-room floor

Bendor Grosvenor searches for the lost portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy]

What if Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he swept down from Scotland towards London to lay claim to the throne, hadn’t lost his nerve at Derbyshire but had instead pressed on — and won? What would Britain be like today? In the year that the Scots vote on whether to stay in the UK, the art world has discovered a painting from that other time when the union was in jeopardy. It’s a marvellous portrait of Charles, painted in Holyrood Palace by the famous Scottish artist Allan Ramsay, when both men were at the peak of their ambition. The only known portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie from this heroic phase of his life, it dates from around 1745, when he led the Jacobite rebellion.

The discovery was made by the art detective Bendor Grosvenor, of Fake or Fortune fame. Grosvenor is English, but his stake in the endeavour was personal. He’d been suffering authenticator’s remorse since 2009, when he proved that a celebrated exhibit in the Scottish Portrait Gallery was not of Charles, as previously supposed, but instead of the Bonnie One’s brother Henry. Overnight, depictions of the portrait had to be pulled from the covers of countless shortbread tins. So Grosvenor, wanting to make good, set out to find an actual portrait of Charles Edward Stuart, and his mission was the subject of The Lost Portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a Culture Show special on BBC2.

It’s a quietly stunning programme, documenting not only the unearthing of the lost portrait, but also a journey into the heart of Scotland. At first Grosvenor circled the fringes of art collections, fingering a posthumous miniature of Charles here, studying a florid modern depiction there. He was helped by the camera. At the beginning it showed scenes of men in kilts and playing bagpipes — not a fake Scotland, to be sure, but still the Scotland the world most readily recognises; then, as Grosvenor closed in on the real deal, it offered more poetic, intimate shots of the Scottish landscape.

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