Visitors to Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design will shortly find themselves face-to-face with a youthful Bonnie Prince Charlie.
A forensic reconstruction of ‘The Young Pretender’ Charles Edward Stuart’s features is one of the most eye-catching pieces at the DJCAD Masters Show, opening on Saturday August 19.
Prague-raised Barbora Veselá has created two portraits of Charlie to show how he may have looked at two key points in his life.
One is a handmade wax bust that depicts him when his Jacobite army occupied Edinburgh in 1745.
It is accompanied by a digital image that shows him bearded and unkempt on the run after suffer defeat at the hands of government troops at the Battle of Culloden.
Barbora studied death masks and contemporary descriptions of the Young Pretender. The Czech student then used specialist software to work out how he may have looked aged 24 during the Jacobite uprising.
“The 18th century was a very different time from ours and people were expected to mature much earlier. However, I think a 24-year-old is still a 24-year-old.
“Prince Charlie is often thought of as hot-headed and spoilt, and the fact that he decided to go through with the rising in a rush did lead to a lot of death and suffering,”
“I don’t think his age excuses any political or personal mistakes he did, but I think it may offer some perspective to how people perceive him.”
Scans and images of his death mask were taken in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow and the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.
Barbora continued: “He also cared about people on the opposing side, loved horses, cooked for his companions and loved joking.
He was just a human,” she added.
Charles Edward Stuart is known in popular memory as Bonnie Prince Charlie. He led the ultimately unsuccessful 1745 Jacobite rebellion, aiming to restore Stuart monarchs to the British throne.
Despite a number of encouraging early victories his troops were eventually defeated at the Battle of Culloden, close to Inverness, in what historians describe as the last pitched battle on UK soil.
Barbora Veselá is a student at DJCAD’s Forensic Art & Facial Imaging MSc course.
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