Scottish Portraits as Biography: Henry Raeburn - a Portrait of the Enlightenment

Hello everyone, my name is James Knox. I'm chairman of the Boswell Book Festival and I'm also director of the Fleming Collection, an arts charity which promotes Scottish art and creativity across the UK and beyond and which has the finest collection of Scottish art from the 17th century to the present day outside museums and art galleries. It gives me great pleasure to pass you over now to James Holloway who will introduce himself. I'm James Holloway and for about 12 years I was the director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and now I'm chairman of the Abbotsford Trust which looks after the wonderful house of Abbotsford outside Melrose and the Scottish borders and does everything to promote Scots writing and Scots character as a great national figure. We're here today to talk about one painting in the collection of James Holloway. It's a portrait by the great Scottish Enlightenment portrait painter Sir Henry Rayburn of the equally great and interesting but younger architect James Gillespie Graham who was the architect of an aspect of Edinburgh's world-famous new town. James, would you like to explain first of all a background to Henry Rayburn? Well Henry Rayburn was the leading portrait painter in Scotland right at the end of the 18th century and right through until his death in 1823 and he was painting at that sort of magical time in Scotland when there were such a wealth of great interesting characterful people and he was the first portrait painter that Scotland produced who really could make his career entirely in Scotland without having to have a London practice as well. He's a contemporary of Thomas Lawrence. Lawrence would be his English contemporary, Lawrence being the president of the Royal Academy in London and at one stage Rayburn did try and set up in London but Thomas Lawrence said you're much better off in Edinburgh and actually it was very good advice. It wasn't trying to shove him away, it was just saying why don't you stick to Edinburgh where you've got great people to paint and that's what Rayburn did for the whole of his life. We know these wonderful portraits of the Highland Chiefs in their tartan, the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, great scientists and medics and all the great characters and the wonderful women who also played a great role in Scottish society at the time. So our vision of Enlightenment Scotland, late Enlightenment Scotland, comes really through the images that Rayburn created. So he actually creates the whole period for us which all great portrait painters do. If you think of Van Dyck in the 17th century, Van Dyck creates our image of the Stuart court. Well Rayburn does the same for Enlightenment Scotland. Can you pinpoint his style as it was developing from his predecessors in the 18th century, either Scottish predecessors or European predecessors? Yes, I would have thought he's a very interesting artist who really doesn't seem to have used drawing at all. His great predecessor is Alan Ramsey who's a wonderful painter but Alan Ramsey had a practice in London as well as in Edinburgh and latterly much more in London than in Edinburgh. But Ramsey really drew like an angel, in fact he showed off by showing the Italian painters how well he could draw and showed that a Scot could draw as well as an Italian and actually he was quite right. But we have no drawings by Rayburn and he may never have drawn at all and he may just have painted straight onto the canvas and very often that spontaneity that Rayburn produces which Ramsey doesn't, and I'm not saying that one's better than the other for it, but Rayburn produces this wonderful feeling of fluency of paint and you just sort of feel the brush working around the canvas putting the paint on in dribs and drabs, wonderful, the whole thing springs to life and there seems to be a quickness of it all which just sort of sparkles and that's one of the things I love about Rayburn. So who was his subject of this painting, James Gillespie Graham? Well James Gillespie Graham was actually born James Gillespie and he was a sort of grafter really and that's perhaps a bit unfair but he was a man who was absolutely determined quite rightly to make his mark, he was very able, he had the good fortune and good sense to marry an heiress, he married a Miss Graham who came with a considerable sum of money and inherited an estate in Perthshire and I think it was probably on the back of that marriage and the money that came in with it that he decided to go to Scotland's most expensive portrait painter and have his portrait painted. At that stage we're probably talking almost the last portrait that Rayburn ever painted so we're talking about 1822, 1823, something like that. James Gillespie Graham was really not a big name in Scottish architecture but he was determined to become a big name and I think his commission of Rayburn's portrait was all part of a self-promotional programme. It's rather sort of 21st century I feel in its product placement, it's getting his face known and I'm sure that picture worked for its living when it hung in Gillespie Graham's offices down in Portobello so anybody coming in would have thought ah he was painted by Rayburn, well so was my uncle or my father and that's okay so more business comes that way. But one of the things about Gillespie Graham was he was in some ways a sort of jack-of-all-trades which perhaps people don't really like but he was a master of the Scottish baronial, he's a master of the classical. To me his great great work is Murray Place. He was the architect for the Earl of Murray when he laid out all the grounds on the Murray Fuse. Now that's the area in Edinburgh behind Charlotte Square just north of Charlotte Square and to the west of the second new town, a big area but also a very complicated site because it's on a hill and he creates I think the architectural masterpiece for Edinburgh. To me it's even better, this is Murray Place, even better than Charlotte Square which is Robert Adams' fabulous square just beside it but it's so grand, so grandiloquent, huge great double columns going right the way around this dodecahedron and in Gillespie Graham's time you could look from one side of the square to the other. It's a bit more difficult now with all the trees in the garden grown up and nobody would contemplate cutting them down but I'd love to see them down and be able to see the square as it properly should be. But he was a great great figure and the other thing he had this rather interesting relationship with Pugin who everybody knows about Pugin as the great gothic revival architect but it sounds as if Gillespie Graham actually sort of helped, well saved Pugin who was shipwrecked in the fourth near Portobello and sort of Gillespie Graham took him under his wing and then became a sort of partner with him and they worked on all sorts of projects at Tamarth Castle, at the Hub on the Royal Mile and various other places together and it was a very fruitful partnership and it was a partnership of of equals really. James how come you came into possession of this wonderful portrait? By mistake really I think, it was really meant to go to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and it's a painting that came up for sale and this sounds an odd thing but in the wrong place at the wrong time. James you and I both know that the art world in London closes down in August and nobody buys pictures in August, nobody sells pictures in August but at a sale room just behind Christie's but certainly not Christie's and a sale room that specialised in Russian painting in August they had this painting for sale and we didn't get the catalogues for McDougal's auctioneers at the Portrait Gallery but various people did and the person who really made a big noise about it was a very very distinguished architectural historian, delightful man called Charles McKean and he got in touch and said you, meaning the Portrait Gallery, ought to acquire this and I thought you're absolutely right but we had a slightly laborious process of sort of vetting things and condition reports, there wasn't time to get everything done before the sale but the painting didn't sell so I thought right the Portrait Gallery can buy this after the sale at perhaps even a knockdown price so we negotiated with the sale room and we agreed that we would offer it to the committees at the National Gallery that decide on these things and I thought that was pretty well a done deal because it was remarkably cheap and unfortunately at the time it coincided with the purchase by the National Galleries of the second of the great Titian paintings, the great Poesie, Diana and Callisto and the galleries took the opinion and it was totally understandable and probably right that they got to harbour every single penny for the second of the Titians rather than the portrait of Gillespie Graham so I asked whether I might be able to buy it for myself and I had to go through a number of different hoops but I did eventually and I bought the picture and subsequently I got it restored and it has given me huge pleasure. I also was looking at it last night thinking about this talk and I noticed that his ear is out of focus and it's almost as if he's moving his head at the time. I just think it's sort of so clever. People often say well sort of photography can really do what portrait painting can do but better and the answer is no it can't. I mean photography does other things brilliantly but what oil painting or watercolour painting can do is represent several moments of time in one single image and you've got that with this portrait. You've got this slight out of focus in some areas and focus in others and you do get a sort of feeling of vitality of surface and I think that's what Rayburn was so brilliant at and is exemplified actually in this portrait. James, that's a wonderful summation of the power of portraiture and the psychological power of portraiture as well as the formal and aesthetic power of portraiture. We were going to talk about a portrait by Sir David Wilkie from the Fleming Collection but we've completely run out of time because of this compelling story so that will be for another occasion at another Boswell Book Festival. James, thank you very much. Thank you.