The political divisions of the past led to a focus instead on shared culture; this included the creation of a Scottish literary culture which originated in the Scottish Romantic movement's reaction to Union and included the vernacular poetry of Allan Ramsay. After 1746, Robert Burns continued this trend but others like James MacPherson now looked back to a more distant past that was both Scottish and Gaelic. In the early 19th century, the novelist Sir Walter Scott went further by transforming the Rising and its aftermath into a shared Unionist history. The hero of his novel Waverley is an Englishman who fights for the Stuarts, rescues a Hanoverian Colonel and rejects a romantic Highland beauty in favour of the daughter of a Lowland aristocrat. By 1822, the reconciliation of the Stuart cause with Union allowed Cumberland's Hanoverian nephew George IV to be depicted on a visit to Scotland wearing Highland dress of his own design. Perspectives were also shaped by 19th-century Scottish art; until the 1860s, the Highlands were portrayed by artists like Horatio McCulloch as wild, remote places largely empty of people. This was gradually replaced by the so-called 'Jacobite Romantic' artists who focused on events from the past, such as John Blake MacDonald's 1879 painting Glencoe, 1692. This created a Scottish identity largely expressed through cultural markers like the Victorian inventions of Burns Suppers, Highland Games and tartans and the adoption by a largely Protestant nation of romantic Catholic icons Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie. These views continue to impact modern perspectives of the 1745 Rebellion and Scottish history in general.

Who replaced the artists that portrayed the Highlands as wild?
so-called 'Jacobite Romantic' artists