Mackinnon

[Gretna Green and ‘runaway marriages’.] Autograph Signature of ‘R B Mackinnon. / Last Blacksmith / “Priest” / Gretna Green’.

Author: 
Gretna Green and ‘runaway marriages’; R. B. Mackinnon (fl. 1941), blacksmith, last of the ‘anvil priests’
Gretna
Publication details: 
2 September 1941. Gretna Green [Scotland].
£56.00
Gretna

The author of the present item is the last in a line that stretched for around two hundred years. After the passing in 1754 of Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, which prevented minors from marrying without their parents’ consent, English couples would take advantage of laxer Scottish laws. As one of the nearest parishes to England, Gretna Green became the destination of choice, and the marriage was usually conducted before two witnesses by a village blacksmith, who became known as an ‘anvil priest’.

[ Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Scottish antiquary and artist. ] Watercolour drawing of Edinburgh murderer Mrs Mary Mackinnon with a young girl in her condemned cell, attributed to him in a contemporary hand.

Author: 
Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781-1851), Scottish antiquary, artist and collector, and friend of Sir Walter Scott
Publication details: 
Without date or place. (Mackinnon was hanged 16 April 1823.)
£400.00

A watercolour drawing in ink, coloured in yellow, blue and red, against a sepia ground. The drawing is on a 24.5 x 18.5 cm piece of thick white paper, laid down on a 28.5 x 29.5 cm piece of grey paper. In good condition, with light signs of age. In pencil in a contemporary hand on the grey-paper mount: 'Mrs Mackinnon - hanged | done by Charles K. Sharpe Esq | She had been a great beauty | murdered a man'. The drawing is not signed, but is in much the same style as other examples of his watercolours (for example those in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

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