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. He had never any difficulty, he
said, about either hands or faces. About draperies or light or
composition, he might see room for hesitation or afterthought. But a
face or a hand was something plain and legible. There were no two ways
about it, any more than about the person’s name. And so each of his
portraits are not only (in Doctor Johnson’s phrase, aptly quoted on the
catalogue) “a piece of history,” but a piece of biography into the
bargain. It is devoutly to be wished that all biography were equally
amusing, and carried its own credentials equally upon its face. These
portraits are racier than many anecdotes, and more complete than many a
volume of sententious memoirs. You can see whether you get a stronger
and clearer idea of Robertson the historian from Raeburn’s palette or
Dugald Stewart’s woolly and evasive periods. And then the portraits are
both signed and countersigned. For you have, first, the authority of the
artist, whom you recognise as no mean critic of the looks and manners of
men; and next you have the tacit acquiescence of the subject, who sits
looking out upon you with inimitable innocence, and apparently under the
impression that he is in a room by himself. For Raeburn could plunge at
once through all the constraint and embarrassment of the sitter, and
present the face, clear, open, and intelligent as at the most disengaged
moments. This is best seen in portraits where the sitter is represented
in some appropriate action: Neil Gow with his fiddle, Doctor Spens
shooting an arrow, or Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause. Above all, from
this point of view, the portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is notable.
A strange enough young man, pink, fat about the lower part of the face,
with a lean forehead, a narrow nose and a fine nostril, sits with a
drawing-board upon his knees. He has just paused to render himself
account of some difficulty, to disentangle some complication of line or
compare neighbouring values. And there, without any perceptible
wrinkling, you have rendered for you exactly the fixed look in the eyes,
and the unconscious compression of the mouth, that befit and signify an
effort of the kind. The whole pose, the whole expression, is absolutely
direct and simple. You are ready to take your oath to it that Colonel
Lyon had no idea he was sitting for his picture, and thought of nothing
in the world besides his own occupation of the moment.
Although the collection did not embrace, I understand, nearly the whole
of Raeburn’s works, it was too large not to contain some that were
indifferent, whether as works of art or as portraits. Certainly the
standard was remarkably high, and was wonderfully maintained, but there
were one or two pictures that might have been almost as well away—one or
two that seemed wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope were not
successful likenesses. Neither of the portraits of Sir Walter Scott, for
instance, were very agreeable to look upon. You do not care to think
that Scott looked quite so rustic and puffy. And where is that peaked
forehead which, according to all written accounts and many portraits, was
the distinguishing characteristic of his face? Again, in spite of his
own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John Brown, I cannot consider that
Raeburn was very happy in hands. Without doubt, he could paint one if he
had taken the trouble to study it; but it was by no means always that he
gave himself the trouble. Looking round one of these rooms hung about
with his portraits, you were struck with the array of expressive faces,
as compared with what you may have seen in looking round a room full of
living people. But it was not so with the hands. The portraits differed
from each other in face perhaps ten times as much as they differed by the
hand; whereas with living people the two go pretty much together; and
where one is remarkable, the other will almost certainly not be
commonplace.
One interesting portrait was that of Duncan of Camperdown. He stands in
uniform beside a table, his feet slightly straddled with the balance of
an old sailor, his hand poised upon a chart by the finger tips. The
mouth is pursed, the nostril spread and drawn up, the eyebrows very
highly arched. The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of iron, and have
the redness that comes from much exposure to salt sea winds. From the
whole figure, attitude and countenance, there breathes something precise
and decisive, something alert, wiry, and strong. You can understand,
from the look of him, that sense, not so much of humour, as of what is
grimmest and driest in pleasantry, which inspired his address before the
fight at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet under Admiral
de Winter. “Gentlemen,” says he, “you see a severe winter approaching; I
have only to advise you to keep up a good fire.” Somewhat of this same
spirit of adamantine drollery must have supported him in the days of the
mutiny at the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own flagship, the
_Venerable_, and only one other vessel, and kept up active signals, as
though he had a powerful fleet in the offing, to intimidate the Dutch.
Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the eye, was the
half-length of Robert M‘Queen, of Braxfield, Lord Justice-Clerk. If I
know gusto in painting when I see it, this canvas was painted with rare
enjoyment. The tart, rosy, humorous look of the man, his nose like a
cudgel, his face resting squarely on the jowl, has been caught and
perpetuated with something that looks like brotherly love. A peculiarly
subtle expression haunts the lower part, sensual and incredulous, like
that of a man tasting good Bordeaux with half a fancy it has been
somewhat too long uncorked. From under the pendulous eyelids of old age
the eyes look out with a half-youthful, half-frosty twinkle. Hands, with
no pretence to distinction, are folded on the judge’s stomach. So
sympathetically is the character conceived by the portrait painter, that
it is hardly possible to avoid some movement of sympathy on the part of
the spectator. And sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from
humane considerations, because it supplies us with the materials for
wisdom. It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness
for any unpopular person, and, among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than
to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract
vices. He was the last judge on the Scotch bench to employ the pure
Scotch idiom. His opinions, thus given in Doric, and conceived in a
lively, rugged, conversational style, were full of point and authority.
Out of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of
wine, and one who “shone peculiarly” at tavern meetings. He has left
behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough and cruel speech; and to
this day his name smacks of the gallows. It was he who presided at the
trials of Muir and Skirving in 1793 and 1794; and his appearance on these
occasions was scarcely cut to the pattern of to-day. His summing up on
Muir began thus—the reader must supply for himself “the growling,
blacksmith’s voice” and the broad Scotch accent: “Now this is the
question for consideration—Is the panel guilty of sedition, or is he not?
Now, before this can be answered, two things must be attended to that
require no proof: _First_, that the British constitution is the best that
ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make
it better.” It’s a pretty fair start, is it not, for a political trial?
A little later, he has occasion to refer to the relations of Muir with
“those wretches,” the French. “I never liked the French all my days,”
said his lordship, “but now I hate them.” And yet a little further on:
“A government in any country should be like a corporation; and in this
country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to
be represented. As for the rabble who have nothing but personal
property, what hold has the nation of them? They may pack up their
property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkling of an
eye.” After having made profession of sentiments so cynically
anti-popular as these, when the trials were at an end, which was
generally about midnight, Braxfield would walk home to his house in
George Square with no better escort than an easy conscience. I think I
see him getting his cloak about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a
lantern in one hand, steering his way along the streets in the mirk
January night. It might have been that very day that Skirving had defied
him in these words: “It is altogether unavailing for your lordship to
menace me; for I have long learned to fear not the face of man;” and I
can fancy, as Braxfield reflected on the number of what he called
_Grumbletonians_ in Edinburgh, and of how many of them must bear special
malice against so upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might at that
very moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark close with hostile intent—I
can fancy that he indulged in a sour smile, as he reflected that he also
was not especially afraid of men’s faces or men’s fists, and had hitherto
found no occasion to embody this insensibility in heroic words. For if
he was an inhumane old gentleman (and I am afraid it is a fact that he
was inhumane), he was also perfectly intrepid. You may look into the
queer face of that portrait for as long as you will, but you will not see
any hole or corner for timidity to enter in.
Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were even to name half
of the portraits that were remarkable for their execution, or interesting
by association. There was one picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill,
which you might palm off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by,
you saw the white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman
who, playing with pieces of cork on his own dining-table, invented modern
naval warfare. There was that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for which the
old fiddler walked daily through the streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with
the Duke of Athole. There was good Harry Erskine, with his satirical
nose and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to pop out;
Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking altogether trim
and narrow, and as if he cared more about fossils than young ladies;
full-blown John Robieson, in hyperbolical red dressing-gown, and, every
inch of him, a fine old man of the world; Constable the publisher,
upright beside a table, and bearing a corporation with commercial
dignity; Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if ever anybody heard a cause
since the world began; Lord Newton just awakened from clandestine slumber
on the bench; and the second President Dundas, with every feature so fat
that he reminds you, in his wig, of some droll old court officer in an
illustrated nursery story-book, and yet all these fat features instinct
with meaning, the fat lips curved and compressed, the nose combining
somehow the dignity of a beak with the good nature of a bottle, and the
very double chin with an air of intelligence and insight. And all these
portraits are so pat and telling, and look at you so spiritedly from the
walls, that, compared with the sort of living people one sees about the
streets, they are as bright new sovereigns to fishy and obliterated
sixpences. Some disparaging thoughts upon our own generation could
hardly fail to present themselves; but it is perhaps only the _sacer
vates_ who is wanting; and we also, painted by such a man as Carolus
Duran, may look in holiday immortality upon our children and
grandchildren.
Raeburn’s young women, to be frank, are by no means of the same order of
merit. No one, of course, could be insensible to the presence of Miss
Janet Suttie or Mrs. Campbell of Possil. When things are as pretty as
that, criticism is out of season. But, on the whole, it is only with
women of a certain age that he can be said to have succeeded, in at all
the same sense as we say he succeeded with men. The younger women do not
seem to be made of good flesh and blood. They are not painted in rich
and unctuous touches. They are dry and diaphanous. And although young
ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I would fain
hope they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us believe.
In all these pretty faces, you miss character, you miss fire, you miss
that spice of the devil which is worth all the prettiness in the world;
and what is worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies are not womanly
to nearly the same degree as his men are masculine; they are so in a
negative sense; in short, they are the typical young ladies of the male
novelist.
To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young and pretty sitters; or
he had stupefied himself with sentimentalities; or else (and here is
about the truth of it) Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an
obstinate blindness in one direction, and know very little more about
women after all these centuries than Adam when he first saw Eve. This is
all the more likely, because we are by no means so unintelligent in the
matter of old women. There are some capital old women, it seems to me,
in books written by men. And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs. Colin
Campbell, of Park, or the anonymous “Old lady with a large cap,” which
are done in the same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his
men. He could look into their eyes without trouble; and he was not
withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from recognising what he saw
there and unsparingly putting it down upon the canvas. But where people
cannot meet without some confusion and a good deal of involuntary humbug,
and are occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very different
vein of thought, there cannot be much room for intelligent study nor much
result in the shape of genuine comprehension. Even women, who understand
men so well for practical purposes, do not know them well enough for the
purposes of art. Take even the very best of their male creations, take
Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find he has an equivocal air, and
every now and again remembers he has a comb at the back of his head. Of
course, no woman will believe this, and many men will be so very polite
as to humour their incredulity.