Bourne Fine Art3o July to 3 September 2011

6 Dundas Street · Edinburgh EH3 6HZ+ 44 (0)131 557 4050 · art@bournefineart.comwww.bournefineart.com

The Fine Art Society9 to 29 September 2011

148 New Bond Street · London w1s 2jt+ 44 (0)207 629 5116 · art@faslondon.comwww.faslondon.com

Pictures are for sale on receipt of catalogue

Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture

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Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture

Edinburgh Art Festival 2011

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Foreword Emily Walsh

For Bourne Fine Art, this is a key moment for the staging of an exhibition of Scottish portraiture. In November, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery will re-open after a major refurbishment of its Queen Street building. For the first time, all its available gallery spaces will be filled – to unveil a national collection in its fullest range. Our atten-tion will be refocused on portraiture’s place in the history of Scottish art.

The idea of commissioning portraits has, historically, been a British passion – one that remains as powerful now as it has ever been.  Exhibitions such as the BP portrait awards and other blockbusting shows staged in the national galleries of Edinburgh, London and Dublin attract thou-sands of visitors and demonstrate the subject’s enduring appeal. As a form, it has come in and out of fashion – both critically, and with the public – but its subject is one that always obsesses us: the question of who we are.

 Portraits are windows into the period in which they were painted – not merely because they demonstrate the painting techniques of the time, the fashions of art or of clothing, but because they show us how we saw ourselves. In the seventeenth or eighteenth century, we appeared as precise physiological representations and visual descriptions of our social and political circumstances. In the nineteenth century, we perhaps wanted a deeper examination of selfhood, the notion, as Schopenhauer put it, ‘that the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character’. But, he went on, ‘there was another ingredient to the idea of the portrait as a revelation of being: that, of course, people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous’.

A hundred years later, Freudian psychoanalysis, and modernism in general, discarded the idea that human character may be described by the external. Portraiture has

had to survive its two great threats: the rise of photography and, in the twentieth century, a widespread rejection in the art world of figurative imagery.

It has not only survived, but grown stronger. It is in the nature of art to evolve and progress, but portraiture, if it is really to have meaning, must continue to represent at least an approximation of the physical likeness and the essence of the person. Portrait artists in recent decades have had to do both: to seek the likeness while also pursuing artistic originality. The portrait becomes a way of seeing ourselves over and again. We perhaps recognise that some things never change; but the artist reveals us, nevertheless, as something that always has the potential to be new.

Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture is a commercial exhi-bition and therefore not a comprehensive survey of Scottish portraits. Included in the exhibition are pictures that, over the last two or three years, have come up for sale. They have been acquired in America, in Europe, in provincial auctions houses and from private homes. This is a vast field, from which we have necessarily had to be selective, subject to what comes to market. We hope with the aid of Duncan Thomson’s introduction that you are able to bridge the gaps we have been unable to fill.

We would like to thank those who have contributed to this catalogue: Dr Duncan Thomson, Dr Viccy Coltman (University of Edinburgh) and Professor Kenneth McConkey (University of Northumbria).  Our thanks also goes to John Byrne, Jock McFadyen, Jennifer McRae and Sandy Stoddart for including their work in the exhibition and writing about it so eloquently. We would particularly like to thank Duncan Thomson for his engaging input and guidance on pictures included in the show and also for his judicious and diplomatic editing. Emily Walsh is Managing Director of Bourne Fine Art

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Scottish, English, European – where do we draw the boundaries of a spiritual thing like art? First, a little bit of one kind of art history, the temporal, descriptive kind, and then a bit of polemic.

If we take the title of this intriguing group of Scottish portraits literally, we arrive at a point near the beginning of the sixteenth century. There is little concrete evidence from that time of painted portraits in Scotland, made in Scotland – a time when some of the greatest Italian and Flemish portraits of individual men and women had already been painted. Yet, curiously, a landmark portrait had already been produced in Scotland: the beautiful coin portrait of James III of about 1485, a three-quarter view of the king’s head and so clearly a likeness when such things were exceptional in even the most artistically advanced countries of Europe. It is a suggestion of what might have been, in a century of turmoil.

Even when the beginnings of portraiture in the modern sense become more discernible towards the end of the sixteenth century in Scotland there is a plethora of ques-tion marks. Who was ‘the French painter’ at the Scottish court? Was he the same man as the Pierre Quesnel brought to Scotland by Mary of Guise? Who was ‘Lord Seton’s painter’? Was he the same person as the Adrian Vanson at James VI’s court? How many paintings by that other Scottish/Flemish painter Arnold Bronckorst can be recognised? What do the figural illustrations in the Seton Memorial manuscript of 1591 tell us about the nature of Scottish painting at this time? Who painted the lively but schematised (Modigliani avant la lettre!) early seventeenth century portraits still at Oxenfoord?

Even when the picture becomes clearer with the advent of George Jamesone and his short-term rival Adam de Colone (both represented in the exhibition), the questions continue. Who for example was Adrian de Colone? Who

was the strange painter who combined the characteristics of Jamesone and de Colone in the mid-1630s? Who was ‘the German painter’, a rough and ready craftsman employed by Campbell of Glenorchy in the same years? These are all questions waiting to be answered. What is certain is that, exceptional as George Jamesone is, Scottish portraiture did not appear from nowhere when he started to practise in 1620. This is an impression that the national collection could correct.

Thereafter, of course, records improve, civil strife comes to an end (more or less) with the execution of Charles I and Scottish art becomes part of British art – or does it? In effect it becomes part of European art, but its bounda-ries stretch even further. Jamesone’s pupil, John Michael Wright, rival to Lely in England, goes on to rub shoulders with Poussin in Rome, John Smibert takes the Scottish manner of portraiture to America, Cosmo Alexander also reaches America, John Thomas Seton and George Willison find themselves in India. And so many make the journey to Italy – usually Rome or Naples. It was some-thing almost obligatory for British artists in the eighteenth century. Almost every Scottish artist of significance did it: David Allan, Allan Ramsay, David Martin, John Runciman, Alexander Nasmyth, John Brown, Henry Raeburn, the sculptors Laurence Macdonald and Thomas Campbell. Works by a number of them are included in this exhibition.

The nineteenth century was the century of photography (and also of imperialism and the beginnings of ‘modern-ism’). The relationship of painting to this new technology is complex, and continues to be so. This wonderful new way of pinning down the truth of appearances intrigued painters, rather than killing them off, as some imagined (though miniaturists did suffer). Even artists of the highest calibre, like Ingres in France, would at times ape the tonal

Introduction Duncan Thomson

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Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture

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qualities of photography. In Scotland there are hints of the same in Watson Gordon’s later works. Degas would use photographs as a tool.

Leaving aside questions of cause and effect, with the advent of ‘modernism’ in the early twentieth century (in one definition) it seemed that what has been called ‘the great tradition’ had come to an end, a tradition in which, even within narrow aesthetic limits, decent portraits had always been possible. Thereafter a chasm opened up between the most progressive art of the time and what had replaced the great tradition – the portraiture of the benighted academies, the portrait societies and what the boardroom required – anodyne, literal description that failed to notice that Picasso had painted Gertrude Stein. Portraiture of this sort persists.

This was all part and parcel of a move away from figuration generally in the first half of the twentieth century, when abstraction of one sort or another seemed to prevail. Yet pendulums always swing, and in the years following the Second World War painters like Graham Sutherland and then Lucian Freud (or Francis Gruber in France) gave portraiture a voice that spoke of their own time rather than a re-hashed version of the past. Portraiture became something that once again involved exploration. Yet strangely, the photographic returned in a new form: in effect the blown-up colour slide, a spin-off from American photo-realism. Portrait competitions, like the BP Award, began to be swamped with a kind of mind-numbing

hyper-photo-realism. The kind of human intensity that has to run through any constructed visual image that will illuminate new corners of being had been lost in pursuit of a technique for its own sake.

But two contemporary Scottish painters can illustrate how new ways that enhance our existence are possible – Ken Currie and Jennifer McRae. Neither is a portrait painter per se (indeed, such a concept should now hardly be possible). Both unsettle our expectations, yet their work is suffused with clear intimations of the art of the past. Currie cuts a deep tunnel into the underlying terrors of our time – but his triple portrait of Three Oncologists (Scottish National Portrait Gallery) is predicated on both the sonori-ties and the visceral currents of Rembrandt’s dissection rooms.

Jennifer McRae, whose double portrait of Pat and Geoffrey Eastop in a sense closes this exhibition four hundred years or so from its beginning, uncovers a near-limitless complexity of visual markers that are built into the finished painting. This is done in a way that is so evidently redolent of our own time, taking nothing for granted as the times now force us to do. Yet the surfaces of her portraits have the same endless intricacy and the profound sobriety of the great Flemish portraits at the beginning of our modern European art.

Dr Duncan Thomson is the former Keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Ken Currie Three Oncologists (Professor R.J. Steele, Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri and Professor Sir David P. Lane), 2002 oil on canvas · 77 x 96 in Scottish National Portrait Gallery, commissioned 2002

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Adam de Colone 1 & 2

George Jamesone 3

David Allan 4 & 5

Allan Ramsay 6, 7 & 8

David Martin 9

Sir Henry Raeburn 10–16

Sir John Watson Gordon 17

Laurence Macdonald 18

William Dyce 19

Harrington Mann 20

Sir William Oliphant Hutchison 21 & 22

Sir William Gillies 23

John Byrne 24

Jock McFadyen 25

Alexander Stoddart 26

Jennifer McRae 27

Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture

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1 & 2

Adam de Colone fl.1595–1628Portrait of John Fleming, Second Earl of Wigtown (1589?–1650)inscribed AETATIS SVAE 36/1625 · oil on canvas · 44 x 32 inProvenance: Lord Elphinstone, Drumkilbo

Portrait of Lady Margaret Livingstone, Second Countess of Wigtowninscribed AETATIS SVAE 30/1625 · oil on canvas · 45 x 34 inProvenance: Lord Elphinstone, Drumkilbo

These two portraits, probably intended to be companions although both sitters face right, are among the thirty or so paintings that can be attributed to Adam de Colone. Until his identification in the 1970s (see the present writer’s The Life and Art of George Jamesone, Oxford 1974) nearly all of his known portraits (including these two) had been mistakenly attributed to George Jamesone, Scotland’s earli-est identifiable native painter. The stylistic characteristics of the two painters are in fact quite different.

Little is known of Adam de Colone’s personal circum-stances. His family was Netherlandish in origin but he was born in Scotland into a quite substantial immigrant community of craftsmen settled in Edinburgh and working mainly for the Court in the latter years of the sixteenth century. A Scots Privy Council document (in effect a passport request by the painter) of 1625 identifies him as the son of the late Adrian de Coline (Colone) who is described as having been painter to James VI and I. There are no other records of this Adrian and this has led to the conclu-sion (mistaken it seems) that the painter at the Scottish Court (prior to the Union of the Crowns in 1603), Adrian Vanson, was intended by whoever transcribed the docu-ment. This error was compounded by the fact that Vanson’s wife was called Susanna Declony (that is, de Colone). It was surmised, therefore, that Adam for some reason used his mother’s surname. Recent research, however (and I am grateful to David Taylor and Rudi Ekkart for this infor-mation), has suggested that Adam de Colone was in fact Susanna’s brother and that Adrian Vanson (who had died before 1610) was therefore his brother-in-law.

What is certain is that Adam de Colone was trained in the Low Countries, which explains his more robust Netherlandish style (not far from Paul van Somer or Michiel van Miereveldt) when compared to his brief com-petitor in Scotland, George Jamesone. When he returned to the United Kingdom he was active in Court circles in both Edinburgh and London in the years 1622 to 1628.

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In the latter year, armed with his passport, he presumably travelled to the Low Countries and, despite his promise to return to Scotland, he appears never to have done so.

All of de Colone’s known portraits have inscriptions in a highly characteristic calligraphy (as on these two Wigtown portraits) which are an aid to recognising his works, though his considered, compact style of painting is quite distinc-tive. Among de Colone’s earliest works are two full-length portraits of James VI and I, still at Hatfield House and Newbattle Abbey. Almost all of de Colone’s subjects were major Scottish political figures of the time – for example, John Erskine, Earl of Mar, the king’s playfellow when they were children, his son James, Earl of Buchan and George Seton, 3rd Earl of Winton. Lord Winton seems to have been one of de Colone’s principal patrons – he mentions de Colone in his diary as ‘Adam the painter’ – and the portrait of the courtier with his two sons (Scottish National Portrait Gallery) is probably de Colone’s masterpiece.

The Earl of Wigtown – he had succeeded his father in 1619 – became a member of Charles I’s reformed Privy Council in 1626 and de Colone’s portrait may have been painted to mark his expectation of that office. Although he always remained in favour with Charles, he seems to have been slightly ambivalent about the king’s ecclesiastical poli-cies. His seat of Cumbernauld House in Dunbartonshire for a time offered succour to dissident minsters.

Exceptionally well-connected – he was cousin to the great Marquess of Montrose – he married Lady Margaret Livingstone, a younger daughter of the Earl of Linlithgow in 1609. They had eight children. Since de Colone seems to have worked in both London and Edinburgh, it is not unlikely that Lord Wigtown was painted in London while his wife was perhaps painted in Scotland and the two portraits only brought together at a later date. This could explain the slight discrepancy in size between the two portraits and the fact that the wife does not look towards her husband, the more usual arrangement for portraits of husband and wife. dt

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George Jamesone 1589/90–1644Robert the Bruce King of Scotland (1274–1329)

signed · oil on canvas · 27 x 23½ in

on loan from a Private Collection, Scotland

This image of the greatest of all Scottish heroes was painted by George Jamesone in 1633 as one of a series of Scottish monarchs erected, either on a triumphal arch or on adjacent buildings, to welcome Charles I to Edinburgh for his Scottish coronation. Jamesone played a major role in the planning of this ‘ joyous entry’ (or blijde intrede), along with the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden. This was a kind of public ceremonial established in Italy, France, and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century and involved triumphal arches, painted imagery, orations, poetry and the handing-over of the keys of a city. Architects, poets and artists of the highest calibre would contribute. For example, in 1635 Rubens provided the painted imagery for the trium-phal entry of Prince Ferdinand of Austria into Antwerp as the new governor of the Spanish Netherlands. In the ‘entry’ of Charles I into Edinburgh of 1633 the keys were presented to the king by the nymph Edina at the West Port in front of a painted view of Edinburgh, now lost. The painting of Bruce is a rare surviving fragment of a potent historical event that shows Scotland as part of a well-established European tradition.

The painter, George Jamesone, is the earliest native-born Scottish painter of significance. From Aberdeen originally, he was trained by a decorative painter in Edinburgh and from 1620 he established a highly successful portrait prac-tice throughout Scotland that brought him considerable wealth and great contemporary fame. Jamesone stands out as a painter whose origins were entirely indigenous. Such was his reputation that he was able to attract the Londoner John Michael Wright as an apprentice in 1636 – Wright would, of course, go on to be one of the most remarkable British painters of the latter part of the century.

There is no precise knowledge of a source for Jamesone’s image of Bruce but given the subject’s over-whelming importance in the national narrative it is likely to derive from something that was generally accepted. Such groups of portraits as Jamesone painted on this occasion have their origin in the Italian tradition of ‘uomini illustri’ (illustrious men) which were created as historical commen-tary in the sixteenth century. The concept soon permeated northern Europe and collections of this sort were not uncommon in Britain. One great collector of such series was the 1st Marquess of Lothian and it is thanks to him that a group of Jamesone’s monarchs was preserved at Newbattle Abbey. dt

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David Allan 1744–1796The Origin of Painting

oil on canvas · 27 x 19½ in

Allan produced multiple copies of this intimate scene of artistic innovation during the decade he spent in Italy from 1767. One small oval signed and dated 1775 was acquired the following year by the expatriate Scottish dealer, James Byres and is in the Scottish National Gallery; another two are in the collection of the Accademia de San Fernando in Madrid. Like its ovoid counterparts, this image depicts a young female artist tracing the shadow of her male companion’s profile which is projected onto the wall, and on whose knee she is precariously poised with her breasts exposed. With her left hand, she holds her beloved’s chin at an appropriate angle to capture his silhouette. Her own shadow casts a ghostly presence on the far right hand side of the canvas. An oil lamp illuminates the murky, earth-coloured, interior.

The representation of the Origin of Painting, or the Corinthian Maid, as the subject is sometimes confusingly known, derives from an anecdote told in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. In Pliny’s account, the invention of paint-ing is not attributed directly to the Corinthian Maid but to her father Boutades, a potter from Sikyon, who, with her assistance, discovered how to model clay bas-reliefs from a shadow.

Allan’s version is one of many of this theme that proliferated in the later eighteenth century, especially in the 1770s by artists including his Scottish-born contem-porary, Alexander Runciman, James Barry and Angelica Kauffman. Joseph Wright of Derby produced a version for the Staffordshire potter, Josiah Wedgwood, which was commissioned in 1778 and completed in the early 1780s (now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC). No other contemporary versions have the same degree of nudity as David Allan’s semi-undressed protagonists.

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David Allan 1744–1796James Hunter Blair (1741–1787) with his wife and family

oil on canvas · 98 x 48 in

Provenance: by descent through the Hunter Blair family

This large horizontal canvas depicts James Hunter Blair, the Provost of Edinburgh, with his wife, nine of their children and a pet dog in an inviting Scottish landscape. It is one of a number of so-called conversation pieces or family groups that Allan painted on his return to Scotland after a decade in Italy and two years in London. Allan was originally from Alloa and trained at the Foulis Academy in Glasgow. On his return to Scotland in 1779, he courted the patronage of influential Scottish families including the Erskines and Cathcarts in the hope their favour might prolong his failing career. In 1786, he was appointed Master of the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh.

In the portrait of the Hunter Blair family, the foreground is crowded with the patron’s children, while the background depicts, on the right, a large, inhabited (note the smoking chimney) two-storied country house in a lush landscape and on the left, a view of water and a boat on the orange-tinged horizon. This was the family’s estate, Dunskey House in Wigtownshire. While the younger children play with a minia-ture-sized open carriage, which two small boys gamely attempt to pull, on the far left the elder sister encourages her brother, the eldest son and heir, to leave the solitude of his reading and participate in the family game. Slightly off centre, Hunter Blair is fashionably dressed in a tricorn hat and riding boots. His wife wears similarly fashionable military-style attire, which in cut and colour, derived from the uniform of the British soldier. Her husband points towards his assembled children, while looking back at his eldest son and daughter. In this, he seems to survey his family in much the same way that the viewer is invited to admire his land, property and prodigious offspring.

The portrait is reputed to have cost 75 guineas, relatively inexpensive, even for this artist. Allan wrote to the 11th Earl of Buchan in December 1780 that his general price was 10 guineas a figure. In this instance, he may have charged less on account of nine of the eleven portraits being of the sitter’s young children.

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Allan Ramsay 1713–1784Portrait of the Countess of Strafford (1715–1785)

oil on canvas · 29 x 24 in

Anne Campbell, one of the daughters of the 2nd Duke of Argyll, became Countess of Strafford in 1741 when she married William Wentworth, the 2nd Earl of Strafford.

This half-length portrait is an accomplished union of the artist’s pictorial skill and the sitter’s physical loveliness. Her upper body is shown in a three-quarter view, with her large brown eyes looking directly out from the canvas. Below her rouged cheeks and embellished lips, an expanse of long neck and exposed chest meets her silvery-white and blue dress. The lower part of her torso is accentuated by the shadow cast across her body and the generous, asymmetri-cal folds of her puffy sleeve. The tiny buttons at her chest are echoed in the hair accessory which sits atop her dark brown curls. Comparing the two leading portrait painters of the time in a letter of 1759, Horace Walpole famously wrote that while ‘Mr. Reynolds seldom succeeds in women, Mr. Ramsay is formed to paint them’. Joshua Reynolds painted the sitter in a portrait now in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Another full-length portrait (76 x 55 in), signed by Ramsay and dated 1743 is in the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow. In 1761, Ramsay was appointed ‘one of his Majesty’s Principal Painters in Ordinary’ and was responsible for the copies of the corona-tion portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte, in whose court Anne revolved.

The formal, court, portrait in Glasgow in which the sitter wears peeress’s robes heightens the quiet intimacy of this half-length, which was presumably painted around the same date. With its careful rendering of flesh, hair and luxury textiles, we might agree with Walpole’s positive estimation of Ramsay’s female portraits as ‘all delicacy’.

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Allan Ramsay 1713–1784Portrait of Ruth Trevor (1712–1764) in a Red Dress and White Satin Robes

oil on canvas · 30 x 25 in

Provenance: Private Collection, Scotland

After Ramsay’s return from Italy in 1738 his confidence soared. It is recorded that he told Alexander Cunyngham that he has ‘put all your Vanlois and Soldis, and Ruscos, to flight and now play the first fiddle my Self.’ As is the case in the other Ramsay portraits in this exhibition, van Aken was called on to paint the draperies. Such was the competi-tion for his work between Ramsay and Thomas Hudson they each offered him eight hundred guineas a year for exclusive rights to his services. He was held in high esteem by many artists of the time –Hogarth even called him ‘the tailor’. The striking red silk dress highlights her flushed cheeks to give her a markedly youthful appearance which combined with the delicate precision with which Ramsay records her features lends the sitter a demure and intimate air.

The sitter is the younger daughter of John Morley Trevor (1681–1720) of Trefalyn and Glynde, Denbighshire and his wife Lucy Montague (1678–1720), sister of George Montague, 4th Earl of Halifax. There is another portrait (three-quarter length) of Ruth Trevor by Ramsay dated 1748.

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Allan Ramsay 1713–1784Portrait of Sarah Bridgeman

c.1750 · oil on canvas · 50 x 40 in

Provenance: The Bridgeman family; Mrs Bridgeman, Sussex; Denys Cowell Estate c.1970; Private Collection, Scotland, 2002

It is thought that the sitter was the daughter of a peer who married into the Bridgeman family. Possible candidates for her husband would include the three younger brothers of Sir Henry Bridgeman later 1st Lord Bradford. Ramsay, like other London portraitists, employed the services of Joseph van Aken (1699–1749) and his brother Alexander (1701–1757) who were professional drapery painters. The costume of this sitter is replicated with variations in the works of Ramsay and his contemporary Thomas Hudson throughout the 1740s and into the early 1750s. There is evidence the artist has intervened to add final touches that help to smooth over the difference between his own hand and that of the drapery painter. For example, the lace cuffs of the dress are painted to allow the sitter’s arms to be visible through the material. This delicacy and attention to detail is characteristic of Ramsay. The lighting is subtle and Ramsay exploits the reflective quality of the silver satin dress to infuse the picture with soft light; the sitter’s delicate colouring and the fine drawing of the hands are also typical.

The pose of Lady Sarah has natural grace. As Ramsay said himself, ‘a posture in painting must be a just resem-blance of what is graceful in nature before it can hope to be esteemed graceful.’ As you would expect, Ramsay made preparatory drawings and after his visits to Italy he focused most particularly on drawing, and the many chalk studies of bodies, faces, arms and hands are testiment to this. This meticulous observation formed the foundation of his success. Indeed, by the time this portrait was painted he had created an enviable reputation and his prices were comparable to those of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

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David Martin 1737–1798Portrait of Captain Charles Kerr of Calderbank (1753–1813) wearing the uniform of The Royal Edinburgh Volunteers

oil on canvas · 49½ x 39 in

Provenance: by descent through the Kerr family; on loan to The National War Museum, Edinburgh, 1936 to 1994

David Martin is the most notable Scottish portrait painter between Allan Ramsay and Sir Henry Raeburn. In some ways he links the two, but not stylistically. He accompanied Ramsay to Rome in 1755 and later worked in his studio when he returned to London. His training and manner as a result owed much to a European (mainly French) tradition of academic drawing, compositional planning, and precise application of paint. There is little doubt that, having returned to Edinburgh in the early 1780s, he exercised some influence on Raeburn as the younger painter turned to working on a life scale, but Raeburn was always to be a more impromptu, essentially empirical, painter standing outside mainstream traditions.

Martin’s most famous work is probably his portrait of Benjamin Franklin (1767), now hanging in the White House in Washington. Like his almost as well-known portrait of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield (1770; Christ Church, Oxford), it shows the influence of Joshua Reynolds – but both portraits have a methodical handling of paint which is entirely characteristic of Martin.

Martin often combined this quality with a sense of mutability within the picture space, where the subject portrayed becomes part of a ‘narrative’, with the inevitable suggestion of passing time. Examples are the portraits of the chemist Joseph Black (1787), who peers through a raised test tube (Royal Medical Society) and the advocate Andrew Crosbie who dramatically raises his right arm as he addresses the court (Faculty of Advocates). The portrait of Captain Kerr has this same sense of impending action, his right elbow about to be released from its resting place on the muzzle of his gun and his left arm tensed to swing it to the other side of the picture space. The sense of time is emphasised by the shafts of sunlight that break from behind the cloud in the top right hand corner of the painting.

Kerr had served against the ‘rebels’ in the American War of Independence and been wounded at Bunker Hill. After leaving the army he became a captain in the Royal Edinburgh Volunteers, formed in 1794 as a reaction to the threat of a French invasion. Martin has painted him, probably in that year, when he was forty-one, in the Volunteers uniform – described as consisting of a blue coat, a white lining turned up in the skirts, two gold epaulettes, a white cashmere vest and breeches of the same colour and a round hat with two black feathers and one white. Martin describes all these details meticulously. At the bottom of the vast area of sky is what appears to be Inchgarvie island in the Firth of Forth, a place no doubt of great tactical importance in the event of the arrival of French invaders. DT

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Sir Henry Raeburn RA 1756–1823Portrait of William Robertson (1721–1793)

oil on canvas · 30 x 25 in

Provenance: E.B. Cummingham; C.D. Cummingham, 28 April 1887; Ritta Bellesi; Sotheby’s, London, 11 March 1953; Newhouse Galleries, New York

This portrait of the young William Robertson is one of a number of portraits of exceptional quality by Raeburn that have re-surfaced from relative obscurity since the Raeburn exhibition of 1997/8. It is a portrait that, like some of the others, gives a subtly different perspective on Raeburn’s stylistic development in his formative years.

Having initially practised as a miniaturist, a skill that he had developed during his years apprenticed to a jeweller, by 1784 Raeburn had already made the transition to painting life-size portraits. This can be deduced from his descrip-tion of himself in a financial document drawn up in that year immediately before he set off on a journey to Rome as ‘Portrait Painter in Edinburgh’.

Apart from a portrait of his wife which must date to about 1781 (Scottish National Gallery), there is little evidence of what his work looked like prior to this visit. The only credible candidate is the three-quarter length of the young advocate John Clerk (later Lord Eldin), long believed to have been destroyed but recently traced to a private collection in America. The portrait of Robertson, in its rather meticulous finish, has similarities to the portrait of Clerk but has greater confidence in the way the picture is composed. It is unlikely, therefore, to have been painted before Raeburn’s time in Italy.

In Rome, Raeburn made contact with the Scottish cicerone (cultural guide) and banker, James Byres, who was an intimate of the painter Pompeo Batoni. Raeburn must have met Batoni and seen his work and there are traces of the older painter’s manner in a portrait of Byres’s young nephew, Patrick Moir, which Raeburn certainly painted during his stay in Rome (Scottish National Gallery). While Robertson’s face and hands share the high degree of finish found in the portrait of Moir, there are areas which are much more freely painted, especially the richly described oak leaves behind the boy’s head. The remainder of the

setting, the classical plinth, the shadowed underside of the large urn, and their relationship to the distant landscape are all features that Raeburn may well have derived from Batoni’s many portraits of young aristocrats on the Grand Tour.

Soon after his return to Scotland Raeburn began to experiment with ways in which strongly directed light could articulate the relationship of sitter to setting (see the notes on his portrait of Sir William Honyman, no.15) and there are intimations of that here: light from the left sensitively illuminates the boy’s head and breaks through onto the plinth and the lower part of the urn, while the cast shadows are carefully observed and a vital part of the portrait’s aura.

It seems likely, therefore, that the portrait was painted shortly after Raeburn’s return to Edinburgh in 1786 and as he rapidly established his reputation. It has a good deal in common with a portrait of these years that again hints at memories of Batoni, that of Lieutenant Colonel George Lyon which was almost certainly painted in 1788 (Scottish National Gallery), and that would seem a quite credible date for this portrait. It is certainly a portrait with that high degree of sympathy for both the solemnity and the eagerness of youth that would mark Raeburn’s portraits of children and youths later in his career. DT

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Sir Henry Raeburn RA 1756–1823Portrait of Dr Benjamin Bell (1749–1806)

c.1791 · oil on canvas · 30 x 25 in

Provenance: Christie’s, 30 May 1930 (106); to Frost and Reed; Ehrich Gallery sale, American Art Association, New York, 2 April 1931 (71); Miss G. Brown, 1931; Julius Weitzner; Ehrich Gallery, New York, 1933; anon. sale, Parke-Bernet, New York, May 1943; Gump’s Gallery, San Francisco, 1944; T.G.Broullette, New York, October 1954; Ralph M. Rounds, Wichita, 1954; with Sir J.E. Johnston-Ferguson at an unknown date

This half-length portrait of the Edinburgh surgeon depicts Bell seated to the left in a three-quarter view, with his upper body and face turning towards the viewer. His left arm rests in a relaxed pose on the arm of the chair, while his right arm and hand falls over the gentle mound of his belly. Books, papers and a quill on a table behind him suggest he has been momentarily interrupted from quiet pursuits. Bell’s portrait shows him to be a young man, fresh-faced and ruddy-cheeked, whose powdered wig with the grey curls at the base of his neck is echoed in the white ridges of his collar and cuffs. Bell’s sumptuous black coat and waist-coat are painted by Raeburn with characteristic virtuosity in the play of light and shadow – note the details of the buttons on the sitter’s coat and the gaping waistcoat above the sitter’s slightly-protruding belly, where the expanses of black paint are literally framed by the deep red of the chair and the curtain.

Raeburn painted many members of Edinburgh’s esteemed medical community, including Bell, who trained at the Edinburgh medical school, became a fellow of the College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1770 and two years later, surgeon to the Royal Infirmary. He was the author of A Treatise on the Theory and Management of Ulcers (1778), A System of Surgery (1783–1788) in 6 volumes, A Treatise on Gonorrhoea Virulents and Lues Venereal (1793), 2 volumes and A Treatise on the Hydrocele, on Sarcocele, or Cancer, and other Diseases of the Testis (1794). Interestingly, Raeburn does not represent Bell with any accessories that might define him as a surgeon. In his dress and generic books, he exudes the aura of a professional man of business.

A line engraving of this portrait by W. and J. Walker was published in 1791 as a frontispiece to a new edition of Bell’s System of Surgery.

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Sir Henry Raeburn RA 1756–1823Portrait of John Campbell of Clathick (1721–1804)

c.1795–1800 · oil on canvas · 30 x 25 in

Provenance: J.C. Colquhoun, by 1868; Mrs Atherton, by 1911; New House Gallery, New York at an unknown date; Private Collection, Scotland

Exhibited: Loan Portraits Exhibition, Glasgow, 1868

John Campbell of Clathick was a leading figure in the commercial aristocracy of Glasgow in the late eighteenth century. He was a general trader but mainly imported tobacco. He was a man of property and owned several estates: Clathick, Ryding and the estates of Killermont after the death of his father-in-law. In 1767–68 Campbell was elected Lord Dean of the Guild of the Merchant’s House of Glasgow and was re-elected to the same office twice in the following twelve years. It was a powerful and prestig-ious position to hold as, prior to the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, the Lord Dean was also the official head and sole judge of the Dean of Guild Court in Glasgow. The position also ranks as equal to that of the Lord Provost of the City which he was later to become in 1784–85. Add to this impressive curriculum vitae that he was one of the first members of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce (founded 1783) and it is clear he was a man of great standing in Glasgow and the west of Scotland.

By the late eighteenth century Raeburn was a well established portraitist of influential men and their wives and children. The portrait of John Campbell has all the charac-teristics of his later style and robust but fluent technique. The face is brilliantly illuminated in stark contrast to the dark and plain background and the portrait’s simple design. His aim was to give the likeness of the individual with an insight to his personality rather than an elegant, flattering display of his features. He followed the advice of his friend, the antiquarian James Byres of Tonley, ‘Never paint any-thing except you have it before you’. In this portrait Raeburn is clearly interested in the disposition of the character and his mind and therefore focuses particularly on the head. Raeburn’s handling of Campbell’s clothing is with charac-teristic economy and no other constituent part of Raeburn’s portraits, be it drapery, props or background, distracts from capturing the confident gaze of his sitter.

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Sir Henry Raeburn RA 1756–1823Portrait of Adam Rolland of Gask (1734–1819)

c.1800 · oil on canvas · 35 x 26½ in

Provenance: French Gallery, 1911; Knoedler, New York, 1912; Mr Walter Jennings (d.1933), New York; bequeathed to his wife, Jeanette Jennings (d.1949); bequeathed to her daughter, Mrs Henry C. Tylor; Private Collection, Scotland

Exhibited: London, French Gallery, Pictures by Sir Henry Raeburn RA, 1911 (23); New York, Knoedler, Loan Exhibition of portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn, 1913 (23); Mrs Henry C. Taylor, formerly of 21 East 79th Street, New York, at an unknown date

Raeburn painted Rolland of Gask on at least two occasions: in a full-length portrait in the Bank of Scotland collection, another version of which is in the Art Institute of Chicago, and in this half-length. In the full-length portraits, Gask is shown seated at his desk stacked with volumes and ledgers, holding a quill in his hand as he transacts the business of the Bank of Scotland. A trained advocate whose family were from Dumfermline, he became director of the Bank in 1797 and Deputy Governor from 1816 to 1819. On 16 January 1808, he was made a trustee in the sequestration of Raeburn’s estates and Henry Raeburn & Company, a family business of merchants involved in the West India trade and based in Leith.

In this half-length portrait, Rolland of Gask is seated to the left in the square solidity of Raeburn’s sitter’s chair (now re-upholstered and in the collection of the Royal Scottish Academy). Wearing a powdered wig and the monochrome uniform of a professional man of business, the slightly upturned collars of his coat contribute to an air of introspection and quiet isolation. He looks across the canvas to the left and avoids making eye contact with the viewer. The hands are carefully positioned, one on top of the other, gripping the small leather-bound volume in his lap. The horizontal striations of his waistcoat interrupt the otherwise enveloping blackness of his professional uniform.

Despite his withdrawn pose and gaze, his powdered wig, ruddy cheeks and fleshy fingers suggest a middle-aged man of sociability as well as sensibility. An obituary in the Edinburgh Magazine for 1819 recounted that ‘his character was strikingly portrayed by his personal appearance – little above the middle size, erect … his features, as well as person, elegantly formed with a graceful demeanour and fine expression of countenance; exact in his dress, without any approach to frivolity – a finished gentleman of the former age’.

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Sir Henry Raeburn RA 1756–1823Sir Alexander Munro (b.1763/4)

inscribed with title · oil on canvas · 30 x 25 in

Provenance: By descent in the sitter’s family to the widow of Walker Munro Esq., Alnefield, Brokenhurst, England; with Howard Young Galleries, New York, 1929; with Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, where purchased by Mr and Mrs Ralph H. Beaton, Columbus, Ohio c.1931; Christie’s New York, 27 January 2010, lot 224.

Exhibited: Inaugural Exhibition, Columbus Gallery of Fine Art, Columbus, Ohio, January – February 1931 (278); Masterpieces of Painting: Treasures of Five Centuries, October – November 1950 (27)

Alexander Munro came from a Scottish Episcopalian, mercantile family based in Glasgow. Evidence suggests that like many young Scotsmen, he worked for the East India Company in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. In this, he followed in the sojourning footsteps of his more famous elder brother, Thomas, whose career began in the military and who in 1820 became Governor of Madras. A half-length portrait by Raeburn of the brother also sur-vives. Raeburn depicts Munro’s face and neck illuminated in a pool of warm light while his solid body seems to melt into the darkness of the background and the solidity of his heavy overcoat. The light emanating from the left creates sympathetic shadows on the opposite half of his ageing face, beneath which the improvisatory brilliant white brushwork of his cravat is characteristic of Raeburn’s painterly style.

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Sir Henry Raeburn RA 1756–1823Portrait of Sir William Honyman of Armadale (1756–1825)

oil on canvas · 30 x 25 in

Provenance: Mrs Catharine Dallas by 1876; anon. sale, Christie’s, 29 June 1917 (104); Tooth, 1928; anon. sale (a Massachusetts collector), Parke-Bernet, New York, 8 May 1957 (33); and again (a New York collector), 19 October 1960 (39); Richard H. Rush by 1971; Private Collection, Scotland

Exhibited: Raeburn Exhibition, 1876 (224); Toronto Art Gallery, Canada, Loan Exhibition, 1920; Frick Museum, New York, The Richard H. Rush Collection, 1971 (45)

Raeburn’s manner in this portrait is the more restrained one that he adopted after more or less giving up the daz-zling use of contre jour effects that marked his works of the early 1790s. These dramatic experiments with lighting (for example, in the double portrait of Sir John and Lady Clerk, now in Dublin) seem to have puzzled his clients – Henry Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling, for example, disapprovingly referred to them as being in his ‘ falsetto style’. However, there is a small passage in the portrait of Honyman that shows Raeburn had not entirely given up the urge to seek unusual, essentially abstract, solutions to the task of recording the visible. The passage in question is the spiralling brushstroke of white that flickers across the subject’s left shoulder. At one level, it is simply information about the hair powder on the upper part of Honyman’s coat (a late example of this fashion), but at another it shows Raeburn attempting to reconcile his materials, his ‘seeing’, and his imagination.

William Honyman, born in the same year as Raeburn, was an Orcadian from the island of Graemsay. He became advocate in 1777, Sheriff of Lanarkshire in 1786 and was raised to the bench in 1797 as Lord Armadale. His wife was Mary Macqueen, daughter of the famous Lord Braxfield, both of whom Raeburn also painted. Honyman was created a baronet in 1804. In so far as portraits of significant figures in the establishment at this time tended to mark important junctures in a public career, it is likely that the portrait, although modest in form, celebrated one of these events. Its general solemnity suggests that it was painted in 1804, the year in which he was granted his baronetcy. DT

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Sir Henry Raeburn RA 1756–1823Portrait of James Lockhart (1721–1790)

oil on canvas · 29 x 24½ in

Provenance: Estate Collection of Mr and Mrs Henry Lockhart of New York, New York and Longwoods, Maryland

Raeburn’s distance from London was always something that troubled him, practically and psychologically. In 1790 he despatched his early masterpiece, the double portrait of Sir John and Lady Clerk (National Gallery of Ireland), too late to be shown in the Royal Academy. After his bank-ruptcy in 1808 he contemplated transferring his practice to London (which would have been an irreparable loss to Scotland) and made an abortive visit in 1810 to consider taking on the late John Hoppner’s studio. Towards the end of his career he bemoans to David Wilkie that he never has the chance to see his work hanging alongside that of his contemporaries in London.

Perhaps most dramatically, when he was elected to membership of the Royal Academy in 1815 he sent as his diploma piece a self-portrait, without realising that por-traits of members were not acceptable. He had to replace it the following year. Issues of this sort seem to have enticed Raeburn to ape, particularly in his female portraits, some of the overblown mannerism of Sir Thomas Lawrence. That is not the case here but Lockhart’s portrait does show the kind of intensely worked surface and more self-conscious engagement with the sitter’s personality that marked the self-portrait of 1815 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery). Raeburn had done everything he could to emphasise his own seriousness, as a man and as an artist, and in the portrait of Lockhart, which must be of a similar date, there is much of the same feeling of sobriety and high aspiration. Technically, in the flesh areas the portrait makes use of fluctuating passages of light and shade (in effect, classical sfumato) that appear in a number of male portraits of this period in his work (for example the portrait of Sir John Playfair in the National Portrait Gallery, London). DT

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Sir John Watson Gordon RA PRSA 1788–1864Portrait of Jane Whiteside (1790–1878), wife of Dr David Maclagan

inscribed with title on label verso · oil on canvas · 30 x 25½ in (oval)

In many ways Watson Gordon was Raeburn’s successor, particularly in the range of his sitters and the degree of his success. Unlike Raeburn, however, he had an academic training – at the Trustees’ Academy – and his drawing is always accurate and his composition carefully considered. Initially he painted a number of genre scenes and historical subjects but on Raeburn’s death in 1823 a remunerative por-trait practice beckoned and he set out to fill this gap in the market. He was not without competitors to the same extent as Raeburn had been – for example, his uncle George Watson and Colvin Smith (who took over Raeburn’s old studio) were both accomplished and original portraitists. To distinguish himself from others with the same surname, he added the name Gordon to the plain Watson in 1826. His overwhelming eminence in early and mid-Victorian Scotland was marked by a knighthood in 1850.

Jane Whiteside was the daughter of Dr Philip Whiteside of Ayr. She married Dr David Maclagan about 1811. He served in the Peninsular War in Portugal and became President of both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Among their seven sons were Sir Andrew Maclagan, a famous professor of forensic medicine and William Maclagan, Archbishop of York. Her grandson Sir Eric Maclagan became director of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The portrait of Mrs Maclagan is infused with a rare honesty. It is essentially a realist work before realism became an art historical concept. Entirely ‘modern’ in its engagement with the inner person, it is a portrait that leaves the viewer, who is immediately arrested by the subject’s gaze, in no doubt that this is how Jane Whiteside

looked – and how she looked on the world, and her place in it. The only element of artificiality is that we know that she is sitting in Watson Gordon’s studio in Edinburgh and no doubt conversing with him from time to time. But that is in its way another layer of realism. The details of her muslin-fringed cap, the ties beneath her chin, the black satin dress and the yellow shawl are all painted with a straightforward concern for visual facts that match the subject’s confident exchange with the artist – and the viewer. Watson Gordon exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855 (which famously rejected Courbet) and a portrait of this quality would have looked entirely at home in that French context. DT

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Laurence Macdonald 1799–1878Portrait Bust of John Campbell, 1st Baron Campbell of St Andrews (1779–1861)

inscribed L. Macdonald fecit Roma 1843 on truncation · marble · height 28 in

This bust is demonstrative of both the sculptor’s style and skilful technique and is typical of the work that made Laurence Macdonald his name and reputation.

Macdonald was born in Perthshire and apprenticed to a local mason before enrolling in the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh in 1822. Shortly after, he left for Rome. His career flourished and Macdonald spent most of his life there, eventu-ally taking over the studio of Bertel Thorvaldsen after his death in 1844. Despite remaining highly regarded by his Scottish countrymen, Rome allowed Macdonald to indulge his prefer-ence for ‘The Ideal’ and refine his neoclassical technique away from the more realist trends which began to predominate in Britain at this time. Earning himself the moniker, ‘The Scottish Canova’, he became the favourite of British and American tour-ists on their Grand Tour whose trip would have been consid-ered incomplete without having their likeness immortalised in marble.

This sculpture depicts one such sitter, John Campbell, the first Baron Campbell of St Andrews. A highly ambitious indi-vidual, Campbell tenaciously pursued a successful career in law, becoming Lord Chief Justice of England and Lord Chancellor. His biographers record him as being rather self-aggrandising and so it is of little surprise that he sought out an established and fashionable artist like Macdonald to record his likeness in a heroic, classicised manner. Here, Macdonald seems to strike a balance between realism and the ideal, depicting Campbell in a Hellenistic toga but with a Regency hairstyle. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, extravagant powdered wigs were replaced with artfully dishevelled hair and sideburns, denot-ing Campbell as a fashionable man of society but also one of substance. Likewise, his facial features remain perceptively idiosyncratic and distinctive as opposed to overly idealised. A flattering depiction, the serious Campbell would have been pleased with Macdonald’s representation that has an air of gravitas and power, becoming of a stern law reformer.

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William Dyce ARA HRSA 1806–1864Portrait of Adam Wilson (1814–1891)

c.1835 · pastel · 10 x 9 in (oval)

Provenance: by descent through the family

The sitter of this charming portrait is Adam Wilson, a Scots-born Australian, who was brought up in the Hunter Valley, Northumberland. Adam Wilson came to have his portrait painted by Dyce on account of him being his uncle – his mother was Dyce’s sister. By the time this portrait was painted Dyce had been to Rome twice and had met the Nazarenes, a German group whose interests in Renaissance art, early religious music and theology mirrored his own developing tastes. By 1829, Dyce had returned to his hometown, Aberdeen and in addition to lecturing and writ-ing on archaeological subjects, he was painting portraits. In 1830 he moved to Edinburgh and, as a portraitist, was much in demand.

 The most notable event in Wilson’s life came in his late twenties when the title of Maharajah Muda Satiah Rajah was conferred upon him by the Sultan of Siak.  Wilson came to the Malay Archipelago in the mid-1850s and worked in Singapore for his uncle and William Dyce’s brother, Alexander Dyce at the trading firm, Martin, Dyce and Co.. He also spent time in Manila and it can be supposed that he worked for the firm’s office there too. He was for a time proprietor and editor of the Singapore Times – now The Straits Times. 

 However, it was in 1857 that Adam Wilson embarked on the adventure which was to place him in history.  The Sultan of Siak, on the East Coast of Sumatra, became embroiled in internal strife with his younger brother and fled to Singapore. He requested the British colonial govern-ment to help him regain the throne and offered to accept the sultanate under the protection of the British Crown. When this request was refused by the British, the Sultan contracted Adam Wilson – who had come to his attention whilst on a big game hunting expedition in Sumatra – to undertake the venture. Wilson was promised the island of Benkalis and one third of the revenues of Siak as well as conferring on him the title of Maharajah Muda Satian

Rajan.  From early November 1858 until May the next year Wilson tried to pacify the country.  He recruited a merce-nary force of Bugis and European sailors. Wilson drove out the Sultan’s insurgent brother, but soon became involved in a quarrel with his principal, the Sultan, when he tried to put himself on the throne of Siak. The rebel warrior appealed to

the British authorities to stop Wilson:I never before heard of white men acting as

Malays or making private treaties. By the Treaty between the King of England and the

King of Holland (1824 Treaty of London), English cannot enter into Siak or interfere with its affairs. Those white men are acting as if it was their country and ravaging

and plundering traders and women. What do they want with us Malays? I make the

representation in the hope you will assist me against these white men. Let me and my brother

fight it out. Don’t let these white men interfere.Again, the British refused to get involved. This time, the Sultan and his brother asked the Dutch colonial authorities in Riau to intervene. The Dutch saw a possible repetition of Sir James Brooke, The Rajah of Sarawak’s, intervention in Wilson’s venture, and so they sent a small expedition to Siak, drove Wilson out, and re-installed the Sultan on the throne.

 It is thought that Wilson might have been the inspira-tion for Joseph Conrad’s Tom Lingard, hero of Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands and The Rescue. There is cor-respondence between Conrad and the collator of the Wilson family history that states that Conrad and Wilson never met (Conrad came to the archipelago thirty years after Wilson) but that the legend of Adam Wilson lived on and to some extent informed Conrad’s character of Tom Lingard. Wilson went on to become a broker in Singapore and secretary to the Singapore Stock Exchange until 1866.

above: William DyceAdam Wilson dressed as Maharajah Muda Satiah Rajah, c.1860oil on board · 4 in diameter · Private Collection

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Harrington Mann 1864–1937A Family Group

signed and dated 1915 · oil on canvas · 63 x 52 in

Provenance: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York

Four children from a wealthy family face us in Harrington Mann’s Family Group – the youngest girl framed by her elder brother and sister on a high-backed tapestried Jacobean-style settee. The youngest boy in a velvet suit sits on the floor at their feet. Arm and leg positions are most carefully arranged in a series of balancing diagonals bringing the eye to the child’s face in the centre. In a moment of high drama the eldest girl’s elbow cuts the right edge of the canvas. Faces are carefully drawn, contours are crisp and colours are naturalistic. The solemnity of sitting to one of the leading international portrait painters of the day is softened by daylight falling into the room from the right. Although we do not know their names, the group is compelling.

The precocious Mann was the son of a chartered accountant in Glasgow. Having studied at the Slade School of Fine Art under Alphonse Legros, he completed his training with Boulanger and Lefebvre in Paris, before returning to his native city where he shared a studio with David Gauld in the early 1890s. He came to prominence at the Royal Academy in 1891 with a battle-piece, Attack of the Macdonalds at Killiecrankie, and a portrait of Florence Sabine Pasley who later became his wife. Being close to Gauld, he also developed a sense of the decorative and in 1897 executed a remarkable and now neglected sequence of murals on the theme of Scottish Song, commissioned by Ewing Gilmour, owner of the Turkey Red Dye Factory for the Public Institute for Girls at Alexandria, in the Vale of Leven. Although the subject of considerable attention, the young painter swiftly realized that such rare commissions were not a reliable way to build a career and like many of the Glasgow Boys, he was drawn into portrait painting where, according to David Martin, his work was regarded as ‘at once artistic and attractive’. By 1903, the pattern became clearer and in a review of Mann’s recent work, a

writer in The Studio saw him uniting the current French and British strands of portraiture as a painter whose ‘recep-tivity of temperament and style’ enabled him to respond with equal facility to men, women and children alike. Yet some of his early pictures of children, Mona and Cathleen for instance – echoing Sargent’s The Wertheimer Children, encouraged Caw to declare him a follower in 1908 – a posi-tion that became untenable as the painter matured.

Mann was essentially a new phenomenon. Where Whistler and Sargent came to London and lived as expatri-ates, Mann travelled in the opposite direction. Taken up by the enterprising Roland Knoedler, he was launched in the United States and began around 1910 to commute regularly to New York, where he established a second studio. Like William Orpen, also in the Knoedler stable, his accurate eye, firm line and peinture clair greatly appealed to the wealthy scions of the Social Register who brought their offspring to him to be painted. The present picture is likely to represent such a group. Its essential modernity lies in the detail – the knot of a tie, the neat hairstyles, the patent pumps and the black bow at the neck of the elder girl’s blouse. In ten years, these Gilded Age infants will be old enough to attend Jay Gatsby’s lavish Long Island soirées, or maybe savour the luxurious hotels of the French Riviera. kMcc 

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Sir William Oliphant Hutchison PRSA 1889–1970Reading Aloud: Margery and the Boys

signed and inscribed with title verso · oil on canvas · 36½ x 30 in

Provenance: by descent through the Hutchison family

Educated at the Edinburgh College of Art and in Paris, William Oliphant Hutchison was a founding member of the talented and progressive group known as the Edinburgh School. Formed in 1912, it essentially functioned as an exhibiting platform outwith the Royal Scottish Academy, therefore affording the artists greater freedom of expression. Members included Eric Robertson, Cecil Walton, D. M. Sutherland and A. R. Sturrock. The group was unified by a modernist aesthetic and had gained some notoriety by the early 1920s. Hutchison was the most traditional of the group and his work did not evoke the same controversy as Robertson and Walton. In a review of their 1920 group exhibition it was commented that, ‘Usually people look to the Edinburgh Group, as we know them, for something unique, rather than universal; for something of pagan brazenness rather than parlour propriety’. Conversely, Hutchison seemed in many ways to have more in common with his contemporaries Stanley Cursiter and James Gunn, and his art was developing more in the direction of the parlour than the pagan. Eventually he branched off, moving to London where he spent a large part of his career as a successful society portraitist. It was perhaps for the very fact that Hutchison’s style drew upon both the modern and traditional that he was instated as the Director of the Glasgow School of Art in 1933, a position he held for ten years. In 1950 he became President of the Royal Scottish Academy and was subsequently knighted.

Reading Aloud demonstrates Hutchison’s immense academic skill. It depicts his wife Margery, daughter of artist E.A Walton to whom Hutchison was apprenticed at the age of eighteen, and their two sons. The dramatic com-position appears deceptively simple in his hands. In many respects the arrangement is unconventional, yet the figure of his wife also echoes the pyramidal form of the Madonnas of the Old Masters, and the presence of the two boys is con-sequently suggestive of Jesus and John the Baptist. Despite these Renaissance undertones the picture nonetheless remains very much of its period. The slight simplification of the figures and smooth finish of the brushwork lend the portrait a stylised air, as does the almost block-like arrange-ment of jewel-like colours of the palette. None of the sitters make eye contact with one another, or with the viewer.

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Sir William Oliphant Hutchison PRSA 1889–1970Self-Portrait

signed · oil on canvas · 30 x 25 inches

Provenance: by descent through the Hutchison family

This self-portrait, painted shortly after the First World War, is an altogether looser and more low key painting – quite unlike his other portraits. Hutchison has chosen an almost monochromatic palette, the vibrancy of his society portraits nowhere to be seen. His black coat – the folds of which are cleverly de-lineated in a few bold strokes – comes over his chin and obscures his lower face. The brim of his hat casts a shadow across much of the rest of his features. The artist extends the viewer a side-long glance, his hunched shoulders almost appear defensive. His face is downward tilted and his expression unreadable. His eyes, shadowed by his hat, meet our gaze in a somehow challeng-ing fashion. A tricky portrait to decipher, one seems almost to be observing the artist against his will.

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Sir William Gillies RA RSA PRSW 1898–1973Portrait of the artist Robert Scott Irvine (1906–1988)

dated 1925 · oil on canvas · 36 x 28 in

This is one of the relatively few portraits that Gillies painted in a career largely dedicated to interpreting the rhythms and shifting light of the Scottish landscape – paintings that although descriptive in some ways were never anecdotal. Gillies became a student at Edinburgh College of Art in 1916, two years after the start of the so-called Great War. However, after two terms he was recruited into the army and served until 1919. He then returned to the College, completing his studies in 1922. He subsequently studied in Paris under André Lhote, an unexciting late cubist painter whose circumscribed teaching style was not to Gillies’s taste. In 1925 Gillies joined the teaching staff of the College, the same year in which he painted this portrait of the nineteen-year-old student Robert Scott Irvine. By this time his vision was more attuned to artists like Bonnard and Munch – as a member of the 1922 Group he was instrumental in bringing the Norwegian artist’s work to Edinburgh.

The portrait has something of the feel of the sitter being set up on a dais in the College, with a blue drape from the still-life cupboard thrown over a screen as a background. Though possibly painted as a demonstration, it is neverthe-less a portrait that successfully grapples with the problem of conveying the rather awkward, perhaps uneasy, character of the young man. Narrow-eyed, with a nascent beard, and intensely still, the furrows and hills of the subject’s loose jacket (with a blue cardigan beneath which suggests an under-heated studio!) are scored in with an expressionist emphasis. There is a curious contrast here between these ‘masculine’ markings and the elegant, almost feminine, hand, reminiscent (as Gillies probably realised) of some mannerist artist like Parmigianino. In fact, photographs of the sitter confirm the realism of this hand.

Irvine, whose work deserves to be better known, exhibited at the beginning of his career with artists of the calibre of Paul and John Nash. His early work, mainly large watercolours, was surrealistic, even vorticist on occa-sion. Latterly, he became principal art master at George Watson’s College. An active motor-racing devotee, he and Gillies had an attachment to cars and motorbikes in common. dt

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John Byrne b.1940Jeanine

oil on board · 32 x 22 in

on loan from a Private Collection

After a good deal of dithering on my part (due, I believe, to whether I would get the portrait ‘right’ or not), I finally got Jeanine to sit for me in 2011. I had done a pencil drawing of her a couple of years back which I thought might serve as a preparatory study for a painted portrait but the painting in the present exhibition is quite different, the aforementioned drawing having been in profile.

Jeanine’s portrait was painted in two sittings at our flat here in Edinburgh, then completed without any further sit-tings – a sort of ‘formalising’ of the picture which I regard as an essential part of portraiture, a ‘likeness’ being a given as far as I’m concerned. JB

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Jock McFadyen b.1950Self-Portrait

oil on canvas · 28 x 20 in

Provenance: the artist

When you sit your driving test it’s no good simply looking in the mirror before you signal. You have to make a deliber-ate movement with your head so that the examiner sees that you have looked in the damned mirror.

And the trouble with art is its self-consciousness. All the little gestures and genuflections which have to be made obvious so that the viewer knows that you know, and proves that your work is part of art’s great story and its secret dialogue with its own history. It also has to be acceptable to the schoolmarm in the head of nervous painters who want to drag their art down to the level of the word and the dreary anchor of  logic. 

It is difficult to play it straight these days. I want dreams and unreason from art but I also want constraints and parameters and it is only when disciplines can be compared that strands of difference and quality become visible. And so it is with portrait, that king of genres.

Some portraits are difficult to forget. The self-loathing Stanley Spencer getting naked with Patricia Preece and a piece of meat, or the petrified self-portrait of Lowry with his blazing red eyes, but most of all there is Rembrandt and his great sequence of self-portraits documenting the unfolding story of his life. 

Here I am aged forty. I am older now and this is where I find myself aged fifty-five. And here I am again at sixty and I don’t know where I am going but I can show you where I have been and what I was.

I am just like you. JMcF 

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Alexander Stoddart b.1959Portrait Bust of John Byrne (b.1940)

2005, cast 2011 · bronze on scagliola column, constructed and hand-painted by the artist · height 24 in

Provenance: the artist

This portrait of the renowned Scottish painter, graphic artist and playwright was modelled in the artist’s studio at the University of the West of Scotland, Paisley. The original model was a commission from the University. The subject sat for the sculptor twice during the portrait’s composition.

Byrne is represented in a ‘verist’ style, the portrait documenting details of costume and coiffure precisely as they appeared at the time of the sittings. The jacket shown in the bust was bought by Byrne in a shop on the King’s Road in London during the 1970s, and the neckerchief is fixed with a kilt-pin. as

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Jennifer McRae b.1959Movers and Shakers: Pat and Geoffrey Eastop

oil on linen · 48 x 60 in

Provenance: the artist

The greatest portraits spring from an alchemy of reality and human error. The eye is not infallible and the individuality of its vision will create something true. Voice, gesture, a predilected stance, all will feed the observer. Truth will come through the courage to stay close to the original vision.

Trapping this mobile form within the confines of a still, flat surface is just the beginning; to endeavour to give it ‘life’ is as fundamental as the natural requirement for physical likeness.

Through the centuries there are certain artists who have achieved this manifold task and their work has inspired in me the need to set out and unearth this thing – this unknown quantity – the elemental magic dust that is the person within the paint. I continue to dig in hope.

The double portrait sits as a catalyst within the minefield of human interaction; relationship is too simple a term. It’s a play within a play. JMcR

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Published by Bourne Fine Art for the exhibition held at 6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, from 30 July to 3 September 2011 and at The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, London W1, from 9 to 29 September 2011.

Catalogue © Bourne Fine Art All rights reserved 2011

Photography by John McKenzie Designed and typeset in Jenson by Dalrymple Printed in Scotland by Stewarts

Front cover: detail from Sir Henry Raeburn Portrait of William Robertson, no.10

Frontispiece: detail from Sir William Oliphant Hutchison Self-Portrait, n0.22

Back cover: detail from Allan Ramsay Portrait of the Countess of Strafford, no.6

Bourne Fine ArtPart of the Fine Art Society

6 Dundas Street · Edinburgh EH3 6HZ + 44 (0)131 557 4050 · art@bournefineart.com www.bournefineart.com

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