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The ultimate picture puzzle
WHO painted The Skating Minister? It seems a simple enough question and for a long time there was a simple enough answer to it. It was Sir Henry Raeburn, the pre-eminent portrait painter of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose name his aficionados confidently couple with Goya’s. They say Raeburn painted the Rev Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch on the outskirts of Edinburgh in the midst of an era when men of genius, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, roused Voltaire to declare that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardeningâ€. Raeburn, who was born in 1756, painted many of the great and the good of his time, including Sir Walter Scott, who invented the bestseller, and James Hutton, the founder of modern geology. Robert Walker was not in their league, but he was a member of the same select Edinburgh society. We know for certain that Walker and Raeburn were acquaintances. Raeburn, for example, was one of the nine trustees of the minister’s will. Nor was Walker’s family in any doubt as to who painted their forebear. for more click here
