Bog Myrtle & Peat

There’s an exhibition of portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn at the galleries in Kirkcudbright. It’s not my thing, but if I chose to wait for the perfect show to roll around into Galloway, I’d never leave the farm. So I went and was reminded of Raeburn’s style and substance during a period of extravagance in the makings of modern Edinburgh. His clients were the great and the good of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Scotland when commercial investments accrued fortunes from the Caribbean, and there’s certainly a background of muckiness to aspects of this imperialist boom. 

It’s an odd quirk of modern Scottish nationalism to insist that the very essence of Scotland is the underdog – and that anything outside a post-industrial working class identity is somehow external or alien. Raeburn’s Scotland is lavish with Tories and capitalists; braggarts and rising stars from an aspirant New Town nobility. Here are Scotsmen in redcoats, and a perspective on our access to power which belies rumours of forced complicity. It turns out that nobody made us do anything in the hour of empire; we put our own four trotters in the trough.

As his career progressed, Raeburn’s subjects become recognisably modern. The horsehair wigs and tricorne hats which mark his early portraits seem to vanish into the nineteenth century, and there’s a move away from Enlightenment turbans to the simple expression of hair as it grows on our own heads today. I noticed that one of Raeburn’s younger sitters died in the 1880s; that means that her life overlapped with my great-grandfather who farmed at Beeswing and was well known to my own father. At times like these, generations seem to collapse – and if a single life can bridge a gap like this, these people are not so far as they seem.

But the most interesting angle on this exhibition is the fact that Raeburn’s portraits confront a timeless and recurrent Presbyterian dilemma; because to be captured in a portrait, you must believe that you’re worth remembering – and that’s an expression of vanity and self-love which would set John Knox fizzing with fury. Raeburn’s Scots are trapped between a hard-wired Calvinist need for self-effacement and a much more vulnerable human desire to show off a bit. The same contradiction has run through culture in Scotland since the Reformation, and Raeburn’s compromise is to make the lavish gesture, but deliver it in a perversely understated way. His portraits succeed because they’re astonishingly realistic and underpinned by impressive technical prowess. They’re superb and could even be called great… if it wasn’t for the way so many of his subjects are swallowed up in the margins of dark, overbearing canvas, peering weakly out of the gloom like bereaved moles. 

To look at the facial expressions on many of Raeburn’s men, it’s easy to forget that these people wanted to be painted – and were probably paying a great deal of money for the privilege. But instead of lavish, easy gestures of opulence, they pinch their lips and scowl, wearing only the dullest and plainest clothing as a kind of pessimistic, puritanical penitence. Even the happier ones have trouble with the act of smiling. Their wealth is uneasily worn, and their expressions are colicky and smug. As an artist, Raeburn earned considerable fame and celebrity because this is how our powerful people wanted to be seen – immortalised in gestures of crabbit discomfort. 

It’s hard to ignore comparisons with Francisco de Goya’s portraits of the Spanish court during exactly the same period. While Raeburn was blocking out the dowdy gollums of Midlothian, Goya was spraying his work with representative gouts of brightness and warm light; his subjects are emblazoned with silk mantillas, medallions and the noisy crust of gold embroidery. It’s a clear point of divergence between Scotland and the antithetical Spain, and while you’d certainly say that Raeburn’s work is more careful and realistic than Goya’s magical approximations, the Scotsman always feels darker, deeper and more complicated. In his defence, Raeburn does seem to have had something like a sense of humour, but his jokes are puckish and almost always unfunny; an intricately rendered “teehee” which seems desperately slender in the face of Goya’s reckless bellow. 

The exhibition warrants a mention on this blog because Raeburn is holding up a mirror to lowland Scots like me. It follows that if the surnames of his sitters are gently familiar in a pattern of Reids, Homes, Gillespies and Grahams, the faces themselves are electrifyingly known. The men and women revealed by this exhibition emerge in a pattern of hook-noses, bagged eyes and sunken cheeks which are all too readily accessible in the Twenty First Century lowlands; they balance haughtiness and thrift against genteel exhibitionism; indecisive tubbiness against martial arrogance. And from the milk-white skin of the women to the thrawn, arthritic knuckles of avaricious old men, I’ve seen them all for real with my own two eyes in every shade of triumph, boredom and defeat. Raeburn’s folk are hodden-down with an instantly recognisable blend of self-loathing and superiority – they’re twisted and dowdy and they need to get out more. And they make me laugh because they are unmistakably, unavoidably us.

Photo: (What a ray of sunshine) George Home of Paxton and Wedderburn by Sir Henry Raeburn – property of the Paxton Trust