Henry Raeburn’s lost portrait returns to Edinburgh
On 31 March 2025, a previously unknown painting of Robert Burns appeared at Wimbledon Auctions London, described as being in the ‘manner of Sir Henry Raeburn’. Estimated at £300-500, the painting was secured by £68,000 by William Zachs, a Burns scholar and director Blackie House Library and Museum Edinburgh. After a careful restoration at the Simon Gillespie Studio in London, it was brought back to Scotland.
The painting’s attribution to Raeburn has been carefully assessed by several experts: James Holloway, former Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Dr Duncan Thomson, former Keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Helen Smailes, Senior Curator of British Art at the National Galleries of Scotland; Lesley Stevenson, Senior Paintings Conservator at the National Galleries of Scotland; and Dr Bendor Grosvenor, art historian.
While the composition corresponds to Nasmyth’s original, this work is more than a simple copy. The painting is significantly larger than Nasmyth’s. Thomson noted ‘that wonderful freshness of observation that marks Raeburn’s work at its best.’
Stevenson has studied works by Raeburn in Scottish and American collections: ‘Raeburn’s expressive, seemingly effortless brushwork, the characteristic warm palette, soft, atmospheric lighting and sensitive rendering of the instantly recognisable Robert Burns’. “The subtle interplay of shadows and brilliant highlights resonates with Raeburn’s finest works. The background has changed, as has the format of the picture which is now contained by the rectangular edges of the canvas rather than a feigned oval.”
HISTORY
Cadell & Davies stopped trading in 1840 and their archive was dispersed. Documentary evidence became available over subsequent years. Another letter among their papers contained crucial information:
Edinr 14th Novr 1803 - Gentlemen
According to your order, transmitted to me by Mr Cunningham, I have finished a copy of Burns the poet, from the original portrait painted by Mr Nasmyth. I have shown it to Mr Cunningham, who thinks it very like him, and I hope it will also meet with your approbation. I am ready to send it whenever you please to order me.
[...] I am,
Gentlemen, your most obedient servant,
Henry Raeburn
Here was the evidence that Raeburn’s portrait of Burns, painted seven years after the poet’s death, was based on the original by Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840), the definitive image by which Scotland’s ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ is remembered. It was commissioned by the Edinburgh bookseller William Creech to be engraved by John Beugo as the frontispiece for the second published edition of Burns’s poems in 1787.
Burns gave several sittings to Nasmyth and the two became friends. They were of a similar age and shared politically radical leanings. Nasmyth’s portrait spread across the world, through engravings, sculptures, painted copies and countless modes of reproduction from shortbread tins to stamps and even Coca Cola bottles. It has been one of the stars of the national collection ever since it was presented to the National Gallery of Scotland (today’s National) in 1872 By William Nicol Burns.
Lawyer Alexander Cunningham (1763─1812), and friend of Burns and patron of Raeburn, secured the commission for Raeburn. During his stay in Edinburgh 1786, Burns formed a friendship with Cunningham. Burns called for him on his deathbed. Cunningham spearheaded a fundraising campaign in support of Burns’s widow. He made the portrait accessible to Raeburn for copying. Another letter, now in the collection of William Zachs, Blackie house library and Museum confirms that the Nasmyth portrait was with Cunningham in Edinburgh in 1803.
The differences William Angus observed between Fry’s engraving and Nasmyth’s portrait are here resolved. - Raeburn looking at Nasmyth looking at Burns
Sir Henry Raeburn, Robert Burns (1759–1796), after Alexander Nasmyth, 1803, Collection of William Zachs, Blackie House Library and Museum, Edinburgh
II What does Henry Raeburn’s painting tell us about Robert Burns? Professor Alan Riach The rediscovered now famous painting by Henry Raeburn was unveiled at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway The painting was lost for 200 years and has been on public display since January the National Galleries Edinburgh.
It was found in a house clearance in Surrey, England, and auctioned in Wimbledon in March 2025, starting price of £300-£500. The winning bid was £68,000. Its purchase was a triumph. Dr William Zachs, director of Blackie House Library and Museum in Edinburgh and long-term Burns scholar and enthusiast, was aware of its potential provenance, realising that it might just possibly be the portrait he had heard about which had been missing for centuries. Experts later confirmed that it is the lost Raeburn portrait.
It was commissioned 1803 for 20 guineas by the publishers Cadell & Davies, and was based on the portrait by Alexander Nasmyth, the most famous image of Burns. Burns himself sat for Nasmyth’s portrait. So Raeburn’s work was not from life, and yet the life that breathes out of the painting is immediately palpable. The light comes out of the paint.
It was intended that Raeburn’s portrait should be the source of an engraving which could then be used as an illustration in future editions of Burns’s works, so it was sent from Edinburgh to London but thereafter dropped from sight. Lovers and scholars of both Burns and Raeburn had been scratching their heads across generations, worrying about where it could have gone)
Bill Zachs’s munificence and his enlightened purpose is at the heart of the painting’s new history. It’s currently at the museum in Alloway thanks to the National Trust for Scotland. The intention is to take it on tour, to make it available to be seen across Scotland and internationally.
Perhaps there are only two ways to support the health of a nation’s culture – one is the provision of government. For that, you need enlightened politicians who really know the value of the arts.
Such people are thin on the ground in Scotland but this is the established way of most European countries, so here’s an example, loud and clear, of the value of the NTS.
III ALAN RIACH
“I wasn’t quite ready for the power of its presence. Raeburn’s portrait of Burns has its own story of rediscovery and recovery for Scotland, but what does the painting itself say to us now, for its human immediacy? What makes it a great painting, what does it tell us about Burns that we don’t already know?
The other is the work of enlightened, insightful and socially minded benefactors. Dr Duncan Thomson, former keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and curator of the last major Raeburn exhibition at the National Galleries, in 1997: “It is more than likely that Raeburn had seen Burns in his heyday in Edinburgh … and had observed that glowing eye that had so impressed the young Walter Scott. The result is a portrait that speaks in an entirely new way of the warmth, the sensuality and the profound intelligence that we find in Burns’s poetry.”
Alan Riach writes - “What does the painting capture and show us, that makes it so special? Why do we call Raeburn a great artist, and not so much Nasmyth? Give Nasmyth his due. His paintings are fine work and invaluable in their own ways. His documentation of the poet’s face and features and the landscape beyond him are vital records and meaningful evocations. But when I stand and look at the Raeburn, something else is happening.
It's ultimately about the potential of life itself, human vulnerability, the power living gives us, what it is to be alive, and what is lost when that gift is broken, squandered, or cut short. This is an understanding great art provides, and great tragic art, above all. It’s all about how we find value. Raeburn’s portrait of Burns is tragic in a way that Nasmyth’s is not. It is profoundly alive, speaking of an individual’s life and that person’s landscape, history and primal capacity for life, which our knowledge of Burns’s biography informs us was so badly curtailed.
In that regard, Burns is in good company. His fellow writers Robert Louis Stevenson dead at 44; Robert Fergusson dead at 24; or Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Leslie Mitchell, dead at 33. Lives of lost potential, each of them. When I look at Raeburn’s Burns, something of the sorrow of that is present. And then, thinking of what might have led to his death, what dark currents start to swirl? Conspiracies of the establishment to cloud and collude against a political threat, a man whose work exemplified independent thinking?
Writing after the death of Leslie Mitchell to his widow Rhea from his home in Shetland on April 14, 1935, Hugh MacDiarmid said: “It is impossible in circumstances like yours to say or do anything that does not seem horribly helpless and irrelevant.
“I agree with all you say about the wanton cruelty and utter senselessness of such a bereavement – and personally I can accept that; it squares with my irrationalist philosophy of life – but what I do find absolutely appalling and unendurable is not that ultimate meaninglessness from any human standpoint, but the fact that within our human scheme of things it should be added to by readily preventable ills which are in so many ways still more immediately torturing and terrible. However brutally and unintelligibly the blind forces of nature cut across all that seems decent and reasonable, there is no earthly reason why to such unspeakable outrages on human sensibility should be added economic jeopardies and humiliation, and obligations of drudgery and anxiety superimposed on an irreparable loss.
“The latter – the thrust-back of the helpless victims into toil and need, and the intolerable savaging and neutralising of the best human hopes and efforts – is perfectly avoidable.
“In other words, I can face up to the unhuman cosmic course of things and have no religious belief of any sort or any consolation derived from a philosophy that relies on an ultimate good in any human sense of the term; but every fibre of my being protests to the uttermost against the needless degradations and difficulties that arise from a remediable economic system.”
How these words might apply to the writers I’ve named and to many others closer to our time, I need not elaborate, but simply indicate the hard truths that lie behind them, and the courage it takes to face up to them.
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