This vivid and characterful self-portrait is testimony to the technical skills and aesthetic sensitivity that made Allan Ramsay the first Scottish artist to rival the best of his contemporaries, not only in England but also in Continental Europe. The eldest son of the poet of the same name, Ramsay received his first artistic training at the Academy of St Luke in his native Edinburgh, where he enrolled as a founder member aged sixteen. Quickly recognised as possessing outstanding talent in his chosen field of portraiture, Ramsay was sent to London in 1732 to study at the fashionable studio of the Swedish-born portrait painter Hans Hysing. Although his stay with Hysing lasted little over a year, it was most probably there that he developed the basic skills required for the accurate delineation of physiognomy, drapery and gesture. The artist’s sights, however, were clearly set on more ambitious means of securing professional advancement than London could offer. By 1736, with financial support from his father and the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Ramsay was preparing to visit Italy. This was to be the first of four prolonged study trips to the Continent, which not only enabled Ramsay to make numerous influential contacts but also to develop, through close study of paintings by old master and contemporary artists, his increasingly distinctive and delicate style of portraiture.

This work almost certainly dates from 1754–7, during the second of Ramsay’s Italian sojourns. Unusually, Ramsay travelled with his wife, Margaret Lindsay, and after his arrival in Rome in December 1754 he sought to escape from the pressures of the social and artistic life of Rome in order ‘to preserve the greater part of my time for painting, drawing and reading’ (A. Smart, The Life and Art of Allan Ramsay, London 1952, p. 82). It was almost certainly during this period of seclusion and self-directed study that Ramsay produced a group of six self-portrait studies. All relate to an oil portrait of about 1756 (private collection) in which he depicted himself sitting at his easel, paintbrush in hand, at work on the portrait of a woman, possibly his wife, his head turned towards the viewer as if interrupted in the middle of his labours. The present work is the most highly finished of the studies, and the only one coloured with pastel and watercolour. Nevertheless, the drawing clearly reflects its status as an intensely observed private study. Without the flattery or softness with which Ramsay increasingly imbued his commissioned portraits, it presents a notably frank and naturalistic rendering of the artist’s features. The handling of the medium is firm, in contrast to the delicate, almost tentative quality that Ramsay’s drawings often exhibit. The impression is of patient, almost workmanlike care, providing an exceptionally direct insight into the artist’s approach to his work.

This text was originally published in Facing the World: Self-portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei​, Edinburgh, 2016.