Lachlan Goudie on Sir Henry Raeburn and Allan Ramsay

My father was a portrait painter so when I was little he would always give me portraits and photographs in some of his books to draw and some of the first paintings that I was ever asked to draw he'd tell me you'd enjoy this were the paintings of Rayburn. Any series of great images of highlanders and kilts I mean they're total corny cliches but for a child this was exciting this was a thrill and as a young boy it wasn't even just the subjects that Rayburn tackled in those most romantic kinds of portraits but it was the way that he approached the canvas it was an instinctive spontaneous flamboyant style that I was thrilled by and gradually as I've hopefully matured as an artist I've also begun to look at all the other great portrait painters who have surrounded Rayburn and particularly recently Alan Ramsey and admiring what makes him slightly different from someone like Rayburn. The thing about Rayburn though which is intriguing is that there are no existing sketches or drawings by him but as an artist when I look at his paintings I can see that he was drawing with a brush and I can just imagine how he outlined with a brush those first stages and the spirit the character of that sitter would already have been in those paintings whereas Ramsey you know he's he's an artist who is considered he's clinical he stages his way through each painting but the exciting thing that I learned about Ramsey was that initially when he started his portraits a technique that he learned from Italy had been this almost flamboyant red underpainting so that he had this emotional spirit inside him too. The finished paintings that you see by Alan Ramsey have this porcelain poise but underneath them there's this sort of passionate red glow of the first step which I think burns through the flesh and his paintings if you look into the history of the characters are depicted if you look into the history of his own life if you look into that extraordinary portrait of his poor dead son I mean you feel passion from Ramsey in a way that I hadn't realized until I looked more into his own technique.