One of only three known portraits by Henry Raeburn of artists, the other two representing the leading English portrait sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey and the Scottish landscapist Hugh William (‘Grecian’) Williams, this reflective self-portrait is invested with all the gravitas of an archetypal image. A powerful symbol of Raeburn’s metropolitan stature as well as his local renown in Scotland, it was conceived in 1815 as his diploma picture for admission to full membership of the Royal Academy in London. That achievement, which he evidently regarded as the ultimate distinction then available to British artists, had been an aspiration since his exhibition debut at the Academy in 1792.

 The death of his one-time professional mentor David Martin (cat.27) in 1797 had assisted in consolidating the younger portraitist’s growing dominance in his native Edinburgh and, by extension, the whole of Scotland. Within two years his expanding business justified relocation to more spacious and custom-built premises on the eastern margins of the Georgian New Town in Edinburgh, at 16 (now 32) York Place. This is a grand terraced tenement which has retained in the first-floor studio the great north-facing windows installed by Raeburn, as well as an intricate series of shutters designed to control the flow of light into the room during sittings.

By 1810, as the unchallenged doyen of Scottish portraitists, he was contemplating a permanent move to London, probably following the precedent of the resounding success obtained by David Wilkie. Although Raeburn changed his mind and committed to remaining in Edinburgh, he continued to court southern patronage by exhibiting annually at the Academy until his death in 1823. In Scotland he was lionised as ‘the first Scottish portrait painter of eminence who settled in his native country’.

Ironically, it seems that he did not realise that his statement picture, being a self-portrait, was inadmissible as a diploma work. On its rejection by the Academy Council, he substituted Boy and Rabbit, about 1814 (The Royal Academy of Arts, London), a likeness of his step-grandson Henry Raeburn Inglis, and which, like his self-portrait with its deep romantic intensity, reveals his responsiveness to the portraiture of Thomas Lawrence.

Despite Raeburn’s apparent compositional difficulties with his own portrait, it surely captures to perfection his ‘fine intellectual countenance’ and deep-set expressive eyes, as described by several contemporaries. Retained by the artist during his lifetime and then passed down the Raeburn family until the 1880s, this defining self-portrait set the seal upon the commemorative exhibition of his works held in his own studio-cum- gallery in York Place in 1824. Two years earlier, on the occasion of George IV’s visit to Edinburgh, he had been knighted and in 1823, as he lapsed into terminal illness, appointed Royal Limner for Scotland. Sadly, the monarch’s desire to sit to Sir Henry was never realised. 

This text was first published in Facing the World: Self Portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei (2016).