Figure 1.--This Scottish cabinet card shows three siblings. The two boys wears traditional styled sailor suits with three-stripe detailing. One boy holds a badmitton raquet, a prop we often see in British portrairs. The boys look to be about 6-8 years old. We note their younger sibling is a girl because of the flower basket. We are not sure about the date. The traditional styling looks more in keeping with the 1890s than the 1880s, but the the long knee pants dark colored mpunt looks more like the 1880s. We might guess that it was taken about 1885-90. The studio was N. Paton in Glasgow.

We do not notice any spcific Scottish stylistic trends. As far as we can tell, the sailor suits worn in Scotland were essentially the same as the styles in England. Of course as both were based on Royal Navy uniforms, there were unlikely to be any great differences. Scottish and Irish regiments in the British Army had some Of course British sailor suits were made in wide range of styles. The Royal Navy was diferent, there was one standard uniform on the entire service. While the Royal Navy had a standard unifirm, but sailor suits for boys throughout Britain were made with a wide range of detailing. Most had the standard icomic 'V' collar, but beyond that the detailing varied widely, especially in the 19th centurry. In fact most of the sailor suits cottish and english boys wore were not the tradituinal 3-strip styles worn by the Royal Navy. Most sailor suits we see boys wearing un fact did not have any stripes at all. We see many boys with V-collars done in the same color as the blouse or done in contrasting colors, but without stripes. Here we think that there were social class differences. We see these plain suits in the availavle school portraits, but in formal studio portraits done for boys from well-to-do families we are more likely to see the traditional suits with the three-stripe detailing. The same was true of English boys. The only difference we have noted in Scotland is that sailors suits were somewhay less common in Scotland, at least that is our preliminary ssessment. We have not yet noted any stylistic differences.

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Created: 12:38 AM 5/28/2016
Last updated: 12:38 AM 5/28/2016