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Leading Scottish portrait
painter during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
In about 1771
Raeburn was apprenticed to the goldsmith James Gilliland and is said to
have studied with the Edinburgh portrait painter David Martin briefly
in 1775. But for the most part Raeburn was self-taught, progressing from
miniature painting to full-scale portraiture. A portrait of George Chalmers
(1776; Dunfermline Town Hall) is Raeburn's earliest known portrait, and
its faulty drawing and incorrect perspective suggest the artist's lack
of formal training. By his marriage to a wealthy widow in 1778, he achieved
financial security, and during the next four years he considerably improved
his artistic skill. In London in 1785, while en route to a tour of Italy,
he met Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose
works were already familiar to him from Scottish collections and engravings.
A man of many
interests and a good conversationalist, Raeburn became a popular member
of the new cultured Edinburgh society. By about 1790 he had painted the
portrait of his wife (Countess Mountbatten Collection) and the double
portrait of Sir John and Lady Clerk (Sir Alfred Beit Collection), in which
the artist experimented with unusual lighting from behind the sitters'
heads. During the following decade Raeburn produced some of his most brilliant
portraits, such as Sir John Sinclair (c. 1794-95; National Gallery of
Scotland, Edinburgh), which foreshadowed The MacNab (c. 1803-13; John
Dewar and Sons, Ltd., London), in which tonalities became darker and lighting
more contrasted. In 1812 he was elected president of the Edinburgh Society
of Artists, becoming a Royal Academician in 1815. He was knighted in 1822
and shortly thereafter was appointed His Majesty's Limner for Scotland.
Works
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