This drawing is the earliest known portrait by Allan Ramsay, Scotland’s most celebrated 18th-century artist. Showing his father, the poet and bookseller, Allan Ramsay Senior, it is clear evidence of the 16-year-old artist’s precocious talent. In the following years, Ramsay would train at Edinburgh’s newly established academy for artists, the Academy of St Luke, and in London under the leading portrait painter, Thomas Hudson. But both father and son knew that such talent could only be developed to its full in Italy, home of Europe’s most prestigious art schools and studios. After much effort, they raised the funds for a nearly two-year period of study in Italy, setting Ramsay firmly on the path to being Scotland’s first artist of genuinely international fame.