The King of Scots in Battle
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Object number21276
TitleThe King of Scots in Battle
DescriptionThis highly detailed, vividly coloured sculpture depicts King Robert the Bruce as he is best known - the warrior King of Scots, whose romanticised image appears in countless paintings, on banknotes and in films. It was made in 1968 by the sculptor Charles D’Orville Pilkington Jackson.
It was inspired by the figure on the Great Seal of Robert the Bruce and is an exact copy of a statue commissioned by Chivas Brothers Ltd which stands in the grounds of the whisky company’s head office in Paisley.
Pilkington Jackson is perhaps best known for the immensely powerful, bronze statue of Robert the Bruce that stands at Bannockburn Heritage Centre. Now one of the most-photographed statues in Scotland, it was unveiled on 24th June 1964, exactly 650 years after the decisive battle that saw the King of Scots claim victory over the English army.
Pilkington Jackson (1887-1973) studied sculpture at the Edinburgh College of Art. He then travelled to Rome and after serving in the First World War he spent much of the 1920s working on memorials, including being a supervising sculptor for the National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle.
The sculptor researched his subjects thoroughly and was determined to make his work as authentic as possible. Pilkington Jackson is known to have studied facial reconstruction techniques and modelled the face of Bruce directly from a cast of the king's skull, made in 1818 when the royal tomb was rediscovered in Dunfermline Abbey.
Object nameSculpture