A magnificent resource

It is thought that William Blair was 14 years old when he sat for Henry Raeburn, with this famous consequence. Now fatherless for three years, his six sisters and widowed mother destitute but for a stipend from the Crown, William Blair had sat for this painter al-ready, as had his father and his parents, together; so we are not ill-advised to conclude that when this commission was accepted, the artist would have had other than pecuniary motives, and that the subject would have been familiarly at ease with them. One's own acquaintance with this painting began when one was 5 years old, at that age when anxious theoreticians still have not been heard, to declare there is no life in pictures.

On the contrary: where does it begin, where does it end, this prodigious force that reaches out, sometimes to embed itself in canvases? We have seen some people denounce this rhetorical question as incoherent, some as illegitimate; while others, dear in their impetuosity, simply bid the image to come out and play. Very likely this was one's first response to this portrait, although plainly that of a "big guy" by comparison at the time, because the Gallery in which it hangs is sited in a child's arcadian playground, richly treasured for its lawns well-sloped for tumbling and its ponds of dazzling fish. If you want a boy to look at paintings, let him like them first.

This unreasonably benign function has kept this setting close to one, throughout one's experience with imagery. For this reason one naturally refuses to put paid to the place with a page entry purporting to do so. So many children do grow up, however, next door almost to carefully curated collections, that one must hope they all are able to meet them at that phase when unconditional love is the extent of their critical acumen, so that they see the resource in that mode while they still can. There will be time enough for the law - young Blair's destiny - and civet de lapin.

There will be the sport-ing phase, the martial phase, the matrimonial and consolidating phase, and Raeburn will capture them all. His sibling studies are probably his finest things, apart from being stunningly rich documents of Scottish culture and society. One regards The Archers in that light, primogeniture and other customs ripen-ing the composition. 

And then there is his red. Throughout this entry, the colour has welled up from within, to lend mobility and emotion in equal portions. There is no incidental red in Scotland's greatest portraits, yet no injudicious use of that resource until, perhaps, it so irradiates Mrs Moncrieff that you don't know where it begins or where it ends. That seemingly rhetorical question and its corollary - whether there is life in pictures - consumed the whole of the mature work of Mark Rothko, a painter in red and its complaint with black.

Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823)

  William Blair, ca 1814

  Huntington Library, San Marino

  Henry Raeburn Inglis, ca 1815

  Royal Academy of Arts, London

  Robert and Ronald Ferguson (The Archers), ca 1790

  National Gallery, London

  Mrs Moncrieff, n.d.

  Huntington Library, San Marino

Duncan Thompson, Keeper, Scottish National Portrait Gallery

  with John Dick, David Mackie, and Nicholas Phillipson

Raeburn: The Art of Sir Henry Raeburn

Exhibition Catalogue

Scottish National Portrait Gallery,

Edinburgh, 1997©

John Logan

Red

Oberon Modern Plays

Oberon Books, Ltd., 2009©