Henry Raeburn

Raeburn was the leading portrait painter in Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A self-trained artist, Raeburn was described by Robert Louis Stevenson as "a born painter of portraits. He looked people shrewdly between the eyes, surmised their manners in their face, and had possessed himself of what was essential in their character before they had been many minutes in his studio. What he was so swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas almost in the moment of conception. " The sitter of this portrait is Robert Sym (1752-1845), a gentleman of independent means and "writer to the signet" (lawyer) from Edinburgh.