Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface by the General Editors
- List of Abbreviations
- Chronology of Robert Louis Stevenson
- Stevenson’s Essays
- Stevenson as Essayist
- Introduction
- VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE AND OTHER PAPERS
- Appendices
- Note on the Text
- Emendation List
- End-of-Line Hyphens
- Explanatory Notes
Some Portraits by Raeburn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface by the General Editors
- List of Abbreviations
- Chronology of Robert Louis Stevenson
- Stevenson’s Essays
- Stevenson as Essayist
- Introduction
- VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE AND OTHER PAPERS
- Appendices
- Note on the Text
- Emendation List
- End-of-Line Hyphens
- Explanatory Notes
Summary
THROUGH THE INITIATIVE of a prominent citizen, Edinburgh has been in possession, for some autumn weeks, of a gallery of paintings of singular merit and interest. They were exposed in the apartments of the Scotch Academy; and filled those who are accustomed to visit the annual spring exhibition, with astonishment and a sense of incongruity. Instead of the too common purple sunsets, and pea-green fields, and distances executed in putty and hog's lard, he beheld, looking down upon him from the walls of room after room, a whole army of wise, grave, humorous, capable, or beautiful countenances, painted simply and strongly by a man of genuine instinct. It was a complete act of the Human Drawing-Room Comedy. Lords and ladies, soldiers and doctors, hanging judges and heretical divines, a whole generation of good society was resuscitated; and the Scotchman of to-day walked about among the Scotchmen of two generations ago. The moment was well chosen, neither too late nor too early. The people who sat for these pictures are not yet ancestors, they are still relations. They are not yet altogether a part of the dusty past, but occupy a middle distance within cry of our affections. The little child who looks wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in the picture, is now the veteran Sheriff emeritus of Perth. And I hear a story of a lady who returned the other day to Edinburgh, after an absence of sixty years: ‘I could see none of my old friends,’ she said, ‘until I went into the Raeburn Gallery, and found them all there.’
It would be difficult to say whether the collection was more interesting on the score of unity or diversity. Where the portraits were all of the same period, almost all of the same race, and all from the same brush, there could not fail to be many points of similarity. And yet the similarity of the handling seems to throw into more vigorous relief those personal distinctions which Raeburn was so quick to seize. He was a born painter of portraits. He looked people shrewdly between the eyes, surprised their manners in their face, and had possessed himself of what was essential in their character before they had been many minutes in his studio. What he was so swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas almost in the moment of conception.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Essays IVirginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, pp. 83 - 89Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018