Raeburn’s Edinburgh review — studies that beguile and glow

Many people will be familiar with the image of The Skating Minister — a painting attributed to Sir Henry Raeburn and completed in 1795. The Reverend Robert Walker (1755-1808) Skating on Duddingston Loch, to give the work its proper title, was created when Raeburn was in his late thirties and at the height of his fame.

Raeburn’s study of Walker was, however, atypical because his favoured method was to present his subjects with a more intense focus, where the sitter and the artist were in proximity. Although Raeburn’s portraiture predated photography by several decades, there is something in his approach that presages the advent of that medium. Perhaps it’s the freshness and immediacy of Raeburn’s brushwork and the urgency with which he committed the likenesses of Scotland’s great and good to oil and canvas.

Nowhere is this more apparent than his take on Isabella McLeod, the wife of the physician James Gregory. Raeburn’s portrait of this fresh-faced, blushing beauty could have been painted last week. The sheen on the painting’s surface exudes sparkle and contemporary youth. The optimism of the young woman, resplendent in highly fashionable Parisian clothing, says a lot about the upbeat optimism of Enlightenment Edinburgh.

QR-coded information leads anyone with a smartphone to audio self-portraits of the sitters, who describe themselves and the circumstances that led them to sit for Raeburn. Raeburn’s images were the celebrity photographs of the day.

A map of early 19th-century central Edinburgh is cross-referenced with the dwelling places and other locales associated with the sitters. These include luminaries such as Henry Erskine, the Duchess of Gordon and Charles Mackenzie Fraser, allowing visitors to make links with the city outside the confines of the exhibition space.

A series of silhouettes by the contemporary artist Tessa Asquith-Lamb illustrates significant periods in Raeburn’s life, from his childhood as the son of a yarn boiler in the Dean Village to wealthy resident of nearby Deanhaugh and St Bernard’s House to his sojourn in Rome in about 1785.

It’s no mean task to bring a Georgian artist to contemporary audiences but this small but intensely focused show of 18 images — derived from Raeburn’s work in the ownership of the National Trust for Scotland — makes a very good fist of it.

     Until November 23