ARTS
Better, worse or different?
Martin Gayford on how Edin- burgh painter Henry Raeburn measures up to his London rivals ir Henry Raeburn was an Edinburgh man and an Edinburgh painter. He had as little communication with the painters of London, he wrote in 1819, 'as if I were liv- ing at the Cape of Good Hope'. The pic- tures he sent annually to the Royal Academy, he complained, were 'merely an advertisement that I am still in the land of the living'. He got no other benefit from them, 'for I get no notice from anyone', nor had he 'the least conception' of how his pictures looked beside the works of others. That doubt as to how Raeburn measured up to the London men — most of all, Sir Thomas Lawrence — lives on. Is he better? Worse? Just different? It is therefore fit- ting that Raeburn's native town has now mounted a fine retrospective exhibition that helps begin to answer those questions. (Royal Scottish Academy until 5 October; National Portrait Gallery, London, 24 October to 1 February.) Admittedly, the initial impression is a lit- tle daunting. Raeburn painted nothing but portraits — over a thousand of them in total, and with increasing speed after he was disastrously declared bankrupt for £30,000 in 1808. Therefore, the 60-odd works in the show represent a tight selec- tion. Even so, 60 portraits is a lot of por- traits, especially as many are sombre in colour and several — of rugged individuals in full Highland rig — at first glance look like the kind of thing one might expect to find in a Scottish 'baronial' interior, sur- rounded by festoons of claymores and decapitated game.
But it is worth persevering with Raeburn. At his best, he was a brilliant observer of the human face, and the fall of light, who was able to translate those observations into satisfyingly loose and juicy, yet beauti- fully precise, strokes of oil paint. His con- temporary and fellow, Henry Mackenzie author of The Man of Feeling — considered Raeburn not quite up to the southern com- petition. 'He studied some time in Italy', Mackenzie wrote, 'and on his return got into the first business in Edinburgh'. He `painted some admirable portraits . . . very little inferior to Sir Thomas Lawrence's'. One walks out of this show, however, thinking Raeburn must have been the greatest portraitist of the Regency era in Britain, and the true successor to Reynolds (although, admittedly, that judg- ment might have been reversed by a Lawrence show).
Raeburn's artistic evolution is largely mysterious. He was born half a mile north of Edinburgh Castle, beside the Water of Leith, in 1756. His father was a fairly pros- perous yarn-boiler — whatever that might be. The youthful Raeburn who was appren- ticed to a jeweller, became instead a minia- turist. In his mid-twenties he married a woman older and considerably richer than he was — Ann Edgar, a pleasant-looking, no-nonsense body who appears in a por- trait of the early 1790s. Propelled by her money, he travelled south to spend a peri- od in Rome, and came back a much more formidable artist.
What he did there isn't very clear there is a copy by him of a painting by Romanelli, a second string 17th-century painter. Conceivably, though, one of the things he saw was the great portrait of Innocent X in the Doria Collection. At any rate, there is a markedly Velazquian feel about some Raeburns. Charles Hay, Lord Newton, a powerful, brooding presence painted virtually entirely in white, scarlet and black, puts one in mind of Innocent. But in other pictures there is a Velazquez- like use of very loose passages in contrast Mrs James Hamilton of Kames by Henry Raeburn, c.1811, National Gallery, Scotland to more precise ones, and of telling simpli- fication. The coat and breeches of John Johnstone of Alva, for example, in the group portrait with his sister and niece one of Raeburn's finest early works — are an almost flat, undifferentiated area of marooney-brown, activated only by a few darker strokes.
But perhaps it is only an affinity, not an influence, since many of Raeburn's most Velazquian pictures were painted long after Raeburn's return from Rome. His best work in the decade after he came back to Edin- burgh is marked by a daring move outside. The Johnstones and their niece Miss Wed- derburn are painted in bright sunlight which casts strong shadows, like those in a snap- shot. The Reverend Robert Walker is skat- ing along, arms folded, his demeanour so gravely Scottish, his legs so nimbly Scottish, that his piquant portrait has become a sort of emblem of the country.
Raeburn's most audacious experiment was with open-air back lighting, as in the picture of Sir John and Lady Clerk, with their backs to the morning sky. Here, one sees, are two solid, sensible, mutually affec- tionate people. Indeed, Raeburn's pictures form a visual counterpoint to the Scottish Enlightenment — as Nicholas Philipson argues in the catalogue. Just as Adam Smith reflected on the individual in society in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, so Rae- burn presents us with rational, open, hon- est individuals.
`Sober' — it should be noted — in the intellectual rather than physiological sense, since Edinburgh society was notoriously bibulous. Of the judge Lord Newton, so imposingly Velazquian, it was said that his `daily and flowing cups raised him far above the evil days of sobriety on which he had fallen, and made him worthy of having quaffed with Scandinavian heroes . . . his delight was to sit smiling, quiet, and listen- ing; saying little, but that always sensible . . . Newton's potations made him slum- berous both in society and in court'.
The thinkers of Edinburgh deprecated the unfeminist attitude of Lord Chester- field towards women — he thought that they should be considered 'children of a larger growth' — and Raeburn's women are presented with as much dignity as his men. Indeed, in the portrait of General Dundas playing chess with his wife — one of the painter's finest works — he scores a slyly pro-female point, since Mrs Dundas is close to checkmating her husband, who looks rather glum.
The reverse side of Raeburn's naturalism was a romanticism which emerges in his portrait of the tremulously wistful and strikingly curvaceous Margaret Macdonald, for example, and also in the the first por- trait of Sir Walter Scott. Scott was Rae- bum's friend and younger contemporary — he it was who arranged for the painter's knighthood and royal appointment. His children are often mawkishly sentimental in the Romantic mode.
Romantic, too, in a way that reminds one of Scott, are the portraits of Caledonian aristocrats in full Highland fig. Of these Sir John Sinclair of Ulbester wearing a uni- form of his own design for the regiment of Rothesay and Caithness Fencibles is the most magnificently absurd — featuring tar- tan trews not unlike those worn these days by the attendants at the National Gallery of Edinburgh. But the most magnificent is the Highland chief Francis MacNab — 'The MacNab' — a picture that Lawrence him- self generously remarked was 'the best rep- resentation of a human being that I ever saw. Mr Raeburn is freedom itself.' So, someone noticed the pictures Raeburn sent south.
There are portraits galore in Edinburgh at the moment, because a few yards away at the National Gallery of Scotland is a show focusing on John Singer Sargent's `Lady Agnew of Lochnaw' (till 19 October). This, though it is not a retrospective, is a fair-sized exhibition with a number of other Sargents and works by his rivals and con- temporaries. Sargent, of course, like Raeburn, was a master of loose and brilliant brushwork. His treatment of white dresses in several pictures on show in this exhibition reaches a dizzy height of virtuosity in that regard, which could scarcely be topped. The high- lights shoot like lightning down the sleeve and bustle of Mrs George Swinton. The painter, a letter to Agnew's noted, 'should much prefer white silk with rather an ample skirt and, some opportunity for folds and arrangements'. The exhibition has no trouble in demon- strating that Sargent could serve up his sit- ters with incomparably more panache than such rivals as Hubert von Herkomer, Luke Fildes and Millais, who tended to make their Victorian ladies look pained, stoical, good sorts. Sargent made his sitters look like a million dollars, which is probably what some of them were worth. That is the trouble. Words like 'plush' and 'glamour' keep coming to mind, and looking a lot at Sargent, like eating a lot of whipped cream, can be faintly nauseating. One can't help reflecting that a century later, a lot of his clients would have ended up in the pages of Hello!
Change the comparisons and he does not look so good. His 'La Carmencita' is a nasty vulgarisation of Manet, 'Madame Gautreau' — the portrait of a Parisian minx with which he made his name — not a patch on Toulouse-Lautrec. But in the `Lady Agnew' I find a look of subdued irri- tation, a faint purse of the lips — that injects a little lemon juice into the cream — and saves the picture.
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