This small portrait depicts Patrick Fraser Tytler, an Edinburgh-born historian whose epic ‘History of Scotland’ helped generate interest in Scottish historical studies in the early nineteenth-century. After studying law and classics at the University of Edinburgh, he practiced law until 1832. Meanwhile he published several biographies and in 1823 helped establish the Bannatyne Club for the publication of Scottish literature and historical texts. Its co-founder, Sir Walter Scott, proposed that Tytler should write a new history of Scotland. Tytler obliged and his ‘magnum opus’ was published in nine volumes between 1828 and 1843. Though it was certainly comprehensive, his work was criticised for its aristocratic and conservative bias.