Adventures in Abyssinia – Introducing James Bruce of Kinneard

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Take a look at The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johan Zoffany. What do you see?
A group of Georgian Grand Tourist poseurs. But one figure, towers above the rest, stands apart, on the far right of the painting. It is James Bruce of Kinneard, the real Indiana Jones.

James Bruce is introduced in this blog, and in the accompanying short podcast by our producer, Antonia Dalivalle. Antonia explores the story of Bruce’s travels in Abyssinia/Ethiopia in her longer podcast The Real Indiana Jones – coming soon.

In the left-hand corner of the painting, a jumble of valuable artefacts – including a distressed looking lion sculpture – are strewn across the floor. The connoisseurs are crowded into a chapel-like space, the Tribuna in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. This was a ‘Holy of Holies’ – a ‘Hollywood Walk of Fame’ – of treasured European antiquities and artworks.

They were on an eighteenth-century equivalent of the ‘Gap Year’. They weren’t finding
themselves – but rather, the roots of European culture, through art, literature and archaeology.

Between coffee breaks at Rome’s Caffè degli Inglesi, the go-to-place for Brits abroad,
members of the landed gentry would draw classical antiquities and attempt to elevate their minds.Zoffany’s painting was designed to be a ‘conversation piece’. And it achieved its aim. In November 1779, Horace Walpole sent a letter to Sir Horace Mann, sneering that the piece is ‘crowded with a flock of travelling boys, and one does not know or care whom’. Bit awkward, considering Horace Mann himself is in the painting.
The son of Robert Walpole (the first Prime Minister of Britain) Horace himself had sashayed through Europe on a Grand – or rather, Grandiloquent – Tour. Instead of following the pack of milordi around the to-do list of Florentine sights, Horace enjoyed balmy evenings on the Ponte Vecchio bridge in his wide-brimmed straw hat and linen nightie, recounting a list of all the sights he couldn’t be bothered to go and see.

Back to the Tribuna. On the right, a small gathering of Grand Tourists admire the voluptuous posterior of the Venus de’ Medici. One of them goes in for a closer look with his magnifying glass. One figure, towering above the rest, stands apart. In the midst of the swaggering, sniggering gaggle of Grand Tourists, he almost escapes our notice. He’s at the margin of the painting, and seemingly an outsider, but he’s an essential compositional device. He’s one of only three participants in this painting who meet our gaze directly. The ruddy face of Zoffany peeps at us from behind the Niccolini Madonna and Titian’s sassy Venus of Urbino gives us the eye. Is Zoffany trying to tell us something, trying to mark this person out from the others? Who was he? Zoffany thought he was a ‘great man – the wonder of his age’.2 He had
presence. A six-foot four, red-headed Scottish laird, with a loud, booming voice. Despite his raging tempers, he was empathetic and charismatic. His name was James Bruce of Kinnaird.

In 1774, he was in Florence, having just been on a diversion in his Grand Tour. It was a very long and unusual diversion. He went to ‘Abyssiniah’ on his Gap Year.
James Bruce of Kinnaird was the real Indiana Jones. On his black horse Mizra, Persian for ‘scholar’, he visited the ancient city believed to be the Queen of Sheba’s hometown and dwelling-place of the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies. But Bruce was no interloper. He stayed in Abyssinia, today known as Ethiopia, for three years, from 1769 to 1772. He would become a familiar of the Abyssinian royal court. Appointed Lord of the Bedchamber to the Emperor, he would gain unique insights into the country’s royal and political history.

He became friends with the Machiavellian Governor of Tigray and fell in love with his wife,Ozoro Esther, a beautiful and brutal princess. When he left Abyssinia, she threw a lavish party for him. They dined on honey and hunted buffalo.

No wonder weedy Walpole was a bit of a hater. “Africa”, he said, “is indeed coming into fashion. There is just returned a Mr Bruce, who had lived three
years in the Court of Abyssinia and breakfasted every morning with the maids of honour on live oxen”.

Bruce had returned to London excited with the thought of regaling polite society with tales of dining under shimmering African skies with Abyssinian Princesses.
He had gone to Abyssinia to learn about the nation’s people, culture, history – music. He had even brought along a telescope so large it required six men to carry it. When you’re as committed to the pursuit of knowledge as Bruce, you don’t pack light!

Bruce might reasonably have expected a favourable reaction to his antiquarian interests. One of them being ethnomusicology. In 1776, the English music historian Charles Burney had published a letter from Bruce in his book, the General History of Music, where Bruce spoke about the musical instruments he found in Abyssinia. One of them was the Abyssinian lyre. Charles’s daughter – the famous novelist Fanny Burney – was infatuated with the imposing Scot, calling Bruce ‘His Abyssinian Majesty’.

To Bruce’s dismay, however, the London dinner party circuit was less enthusiastic. Instead of the hoped-for adulation, his Abyssinian anecdotes made Bruce a laughing stock. Horace Walpole even said, “Last spring Mr Bruce dined at Mr Crawford’s. George Selwyn was one of the company. After relating the story of the bramble and several other curious particulars, somebody asked Mr Bruce, if the Abyssinians had any musical instruments. ‘Musical instruments’, said he, and paused -‘Yes I think I remember one lyre’. George Selwyn whispered to his neighbour, ‘I
am sure there is one less since he came out of the country’. There are now six instruments there.”

Bruce now found himself bearing the punning nickname – the Abyssinian Liar. Worse still, he had to watch as his contemporary, Samuel Johnson, was crowned the leading expert on Ethiopia.To add insult to injury, Bruce was accused of never even setting foot in the country.

Ostracized from the chattering classes of London, he beat a retreat to his castle in the Scottish Highlands. He had returned to Britain with the aim of introducing Abyssinia to Europe, bearing gifts from the Abyssinian royal family. Now he built a museum in Kinnaird to showoff his ‘curiosities’. But it was a bit of an anticlimax. One visitor thought it was “just a whole lot of fish pictures”. The English clergyman John Lettice remembered his visit to Bruce’s museum thus, “Before we departed Mr Bruce obligingly accompanied us to an enclosure in his park, to show us his Abyssinian sheep. They are entirely white, except their heads which are black. They are extremely tame, and often very frolicksome. The three or four remaining in thepossession of Mr Bruce are unfortunately all males. One of them bred with a she-goat but the offspring died.”

Bruce might have been teasing his visitor. These sheep sound suspiciously similar to Suffolk Blacks. Bruce’s charisma, and his love of female company, opened doors to the Abyssinian royal court. Back at home they were his undoing. In a characteristic act of chivalry, in April 1794, Bruce rushed to accompany a woman to her carriage after a dinner party. But it would be his last. Having survived shipwrecks, rampant
warlords and Machiavellian rulers, he was felled – by a flight of stairs in his own house in Stirlingshire, Scotland.

Bruce was misrepresented in his own day, and although some of his stories were later proved correct, he is still largely misunderstood. The truth was a moral imperative for Bruce. As he said himself:

“To represent as a truth a thing I know to be a falsehood, not to avow to a truth I ought to declare… the one is fraud, the other cowardice. I hope I am equally distant from them both; and I pledge myself never to retract the fact here advanced”.

And right now, it’s more important than ever to revisit his story.

Notes

Researched, written, and presented by Antonia Dalivalle

Edited by Ian Cozier at The Hall, Chipping Norton
Recorded at The Hall, Chipping Norton
With contributions by Steve Hay, Richard Worland, Michael Levy and Nick Vest

Music:

Intro Music —- ‘Mela Mela’ by Seyfu Yohannes

Musical Interlude —- Yekermo Sew’ by Mulatu Astatke

End music: ‘Romance Anonimo’ (Romance by Anonymous) for guitar