In Burns' 1790 poem, the farmer Tam rides home through a storm and passes the haunted Kirk of Alloway, where he stumbles on a company of witches dancing. Bruce crowds the figures into the plate and lets his flowing line do the work, so the sabbath reads as pure motion rather than a fixed scene.
The Tam o' Shanter subjects run right through Bruce's Burns work, and they carried into his best-known commission: he was one of three Scottish artists chosen by the distillers J & G Grant to illustrate the millennium release of the Glenfarclas 40 Year Old Single Highland Malt. The full story is told in the journal and on the commission feature page.
The image is an etching, drawn into a metal plate and printed. Original prints from the estate archive can be enquired about through the contact form, and the related drawings sit in the illustration gallery.
