Raeburn is celebrated today as one of Scotland’s greatest artists, not least for his iconic oil of the ‘Skating Minister’ (Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, National Galleries of Scotland, NG 2112).
Despite this, his beginnings in life were unassuming. Orphaned at a young age and fostered by his elder brother, the teenaged Raeburn seems to have first turned his hand to portraiture while apprenticed to an Edinburgh jeweller and goldsmith James Gilliland. He first produced miniatures, but within a matter of years he transitioned to oil painting. Under the sponsorship of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Raeburn relocated to Italy in 1785 to study the Old Masters and hone his craft. Two years later he returned to Edinburgh, taking a property on George Street. The work he produced forthwith cemented his legacy as Scotland’s finest portrait artist. He worked from Edinburgh throughout his career, and by the end of his life was decorated with accolades, including an appointment as Painter and Limner to King George IV, alongside membership of the Royal Academy, Royal Society of Edinburgh and American Academy of Fine Arts.
Henry Raeburn’s portraiture is intimate. It does not wholly subscribe to the formal Romantic mode widely practiced by his contemporaries, instead presenting its subjects with sensitivity, individuality and warmth. His sitters appear as if mid-gesture, mid-breath, emerging from the shadowy depths of their composition and advancing towards a light source located not far behind the viewer. This effect is achieved with deft, confident strokes of pigment.