While Raeburn's attitude to reality was determined and his style was
formed to a great extent before he went abroad, his ideas of pictorial
effect were broadened and his technical resources enriched by his
sojourn in Italy. Some of the work executed immediately after his
return, such as the portraits of Lord President Dundas, Neil Gow, the
famous fiddler, and the earlier of two portraits of his friend John
Clerk of Eldin, shows, with much unity, a greater care and precision in
the handling of detail, a more searched kind of modelling and a fuller
sense of tone, and thicker impasto and fuller colour than that done
previously. Moreover the design of the first-named picture is
reminiscent in certain ways of Velasquez's "Pope Innocent X.," which he
may have seen and studied in the Doria Palace in Rome, though too much
stress need not be laid on the resemblance. About this time also, he
painted a few pictures in which difficult problems of lighting are
subtly and skilfully solved. In things like the charming bust "William
Ferguson of Kilrie" (before 1790) and the group of Sir John and Lady
Clerk of Penicuik (1790) the faces are in luminous shadow, touched by
soft reflected light to give expression and animation. But for obvious
reasons such effects are not favoured by the clients of
portrait-painters, and that Raeburn should have adopted them at all is
evidence of the widening of the artistic horizon induced by his stay
abroad.
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