A portrait of Robert Burns by Henry Raeburn, which was misplaced for greater than 200 years, has been placed on public show for the primary time on the Nationwide Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. The exhibiting of the work is simply in time for Burns Night time (25 January), the annual celebration of Scotland’s best-known poet.
The early nineteenth century portray resurfaced in a home clearance in Surrey and was auctioned in Wimbledon in March 2025 with a information value of £300-£500. The artwork collector and Burns fanatic William Zachs, the director of Blackie Home Library and Museum in Edinburgh, bought the portray for £68,000 (plus charges) in a tense nine-minute bidding battle earlier than he may ensure of the Raeburn attribution.
“Yearly or so, a portray comes up which may very well be a misplaced Raeburn, and none ever has been. The picture was extensively copied, and the portray was soiled and coated in darkish varnish,” Zachs says. “It was an enormous gamble, however for the best Scottish poet painted by one of many biggest Scottish portrait painters, it was well worth the threat. Now it’s again to the nation the place all of it started.”
Robert Burns, after Alexander Nasmyth (round 1803) by Henry Raeburn Assortment of William Zachs, Blackie Home Library and Museum, Edinburgh
Raeburn was commissioned to make the portrait in 1803, seven years after Burns’s loss of life, by the publishers Cadell & Davies as the idea for an engraving for a brand new assortment of his poems. The artist labored from Alexander Nasmyth’s portrait of Burns, painted from life in 1787, which is within the Nationwide Galleries of Scotland assortment, and the 2 work at the moment are displayed aspect by aspect.
“Firstly we had been fairly sceptical,” says Patricia Allerston, the pinnacle of European and Scottish artwork on the Nationwide Galleries of Scotland. “However now we’re completely sure it’s by Raeburn—it has been confirmed by an entire vary of consultants.” She provides: “We’re delighted to current it subsequent to the Nasmyth portrait, reuniting three of the most important figures of that interval: Burns, Raeburn and Nasmyth.”
Duncan Thomson, the previous keeper of the Scottish Nationwide Portrait Gallery and curator of the final main exhibition on Raeburn in 1997, was a type of whom Zachs consulted earlier than making the acquisition. “Invoice despatched me {a photograph} of the portray and as quickly as I enlarged it on my display I assumed, ‘That is the actual factor’,” Thomson says. “The rediscovery of this portrait is of monumental significance, linking the poet with Scotland’s biggest artist.”
