Robert Brown of Newhall

A young Edinburgh sitter turns out of the shadow in the manner that made its painter the portraitist of the Scottish Enlightenment. Raeburn taught himself the craft almost entirely in Scotland, working from strong single-window light and building his heads directly on the canvas, and the results carry a dramatic concentration of tone that no contemporary in London matched: the figure emerges from a nearly uniform dark ground, the face and coat picked out where the light falls. He painted the lawyers, professors, and lairds of the Edinburgh of Robert Burns’s and Walter Scott’s generation in hundreds of such canvases, and was knighted for them in 1822. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.