Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN
The people who sat for these pictures are not yet
ancestors, they are still relations. They are not
yet altogether a part of the dusty past, but occupy
a middle distance within cry of our affections. The
little child who looks wonderingly on his grand-
father's watch in the picture is now the veteran
Sheriff emeritus of Perth. And I hear a story of a
lady who returned the other day to Edinburgh, after
an absence of sixty years : ' I could see none of my
old friends,' she said, ' until I went into the Raeburn
Gallery, and found them all there.'
It would be difficult to say whether the collec-
tion was more interesting on the score of unity or
diversity. Where the portraits were all of the same
period, almost all of the same race, and all from the
same brush, there could not fail to be many points
of similarity. And yet the similarity of the hand-
ling seems to throw into more vigorous relief those
personal distinctions which Raeburn was so quick
to seize. He was a born painter of portraits. He
looked people shrewdly betv/een the eyes, surprised
their manners in their face, and had possessed him-
self 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. He
had never any difficulty, he said, about either hands
or faces. About draperies or light or composition,
he might see room for hesitation or afterthought.
But a face or a hand was something plain and legible.
There were no two ways about it, any more than
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