Portrait of a nation

Sir Henry Raeburn’s exquisite nineteenth-century portrait of Sir Walter Scott hangs — magisterial, but unfamiliar — in an ordered sea of Scottish portraits, of Scottish subjects, in the renascent Scottish National Portrait Gallery. As the stock picture question of University Challenge well attests, putting a face to a famous name, especially that of a writer like Scott, is no easy feat. Having succeeded, there’s always something satisfying about staring into the eyes of an illustrious figure formerly visualized in the mind’s eye alone. The Edinburgh gallery provides well for innate curiosity, making familiar the unknown faces behind great novels, philosophical tracts, paintings by those more accustomed to residing on the other side of the canvas. But it plays too fast and loose with the word ‘portrait’ for this to be its defining achievement.

There are plenty of portraits here, but plenty of Scottish landscapes, seascapes, glassware besides. Unlike London’s National Portrait Gallery it depends upon the looser, literary reading of ‘portrait’ — more Portrait of a Lady than Picture of Dorian Gray.