"WHO PAINTED THE SKATING MINISTER?" BBC Arts documentary 2006

Acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland in 1949, the portrait of the Reverend Robert Walker, better known as the Skating Minister, is one of Britain's best-loved paintings and an international icon. Since it was first publicly displayed, the work has been attributed to Scotland's great portrait painter, Sir Henry Rayburn. But in recent years, that assumption has been questioned. Distinguished art historians are now at loggerheads and two camps have formed, each led by a passionate advocate. I've always thought Rayburn painted it. Many people have had doubts. I've never had the slightest doubt, actually. I have to rule out all of the Scottish artists, and that's obviously including Henry Rayburn. I think it'd be a great pity if Rayburn is completely debunked, because the connection between Rayburn and the Skating Minister is hallowed, almost. In the last 20 years, its popularity has just grown and grown and grown, and it's a painting that's suddenly become out there. I do think it is one of these images that has an instant hit and has ended up here being a kind of logo for the National Galleries. The National Galleries, I think, have been clever enough to pick up on that. But will art lovers feel short-changed if the poster boy of Scottish art turns out to be the work of a French painter? Henry Rayburn was born in 1756, the same year as Mozart, and was celebrated as the greatest Scottish portrait painter of his age. From his studio in Edinburgh's Newtown, he painted the men of genius of the Enlightenment, as well as key figures in Scottish society. Over 1,000 sitters had their portraits painted by Rayburn. So how did his most famous painting end up sharing its attribution card with another artist? This is the official catalogue of the National Galleries of Scotland, and this is still quoted to this day. And in the short entry on the Reverend Robert Walker, which is given to Henry Rayburn, there is a sentence that states the following, type of canvas, style of painting and scale of figure have no parallel in Rayburn's work. Now that is an astonishing statement to have made. And it's not, even though it's been known by the specialists, it's been known by the National Galleries of Scotland curators, that is, I would say that is a vote of no confidence. That vote of no confidence has resulted in a highly unusual change to the skating minister's attribution card. The card says by Sir Henry Rayburn, 1756 to 1823, those are his dates. Recent research has suggested that the picture may be by Henri-Pierre d'Enlou, who spent some time in Edinburgh during the end of the 18th century. What does it take to change the attribution of a painting? To change it irrevocably, you need to make a pretty convincing case. The case against Rayburn was made in an article in the prestigious art publication, the Burlington Magazine, dividing art experts across the world from the Louvre to the Met in New York. Its author, Stephen Lloyd of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, is convinced that neither Henry Rayburn nor any of his Scottish contemporaries could have been the artist behind the skating minister. So if you rule out the contemporary Scottish artist, you have to look at the visiting artists, and there's only one candidate at this date in the 1790s who's an artist of the sophistication and of the working that style and format that is you see in the painting of the skating minister, and that is an artist called Henri-Pierre d'Enlou. What then convinces you from d'Enlou's style that he was the painter of the skating minister? Because the painting of the skating minister is very similar in terms of format, in terms of composition, in terms of the figure, in terms of the way that the paint is applied, the precision, the craquelure, the cracking of the paint. These are all aspects that can be seen in other paintings by d'Enlou. Perhaps there is a clue in the large painting of the naval hero, Admiral Adam Duncan, that hangs in the Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. It is one of d'Enlou's major Scottish commissions. Adam Duncan became a great hero. He was the biggest hero in Britain before Nelson, and he was painted many times. But the figure that I'm most interested in is the officer seen in the middle background on the left, seen in profile, moving forward on one leg with one leg trailing behind, and looking upwards in profile with the trumpet. He's depicted shouting instructions up into the rigging to other marines at the height of the battle. But to me there are many parallels, both compositionally and iconographically, between that figure in particular and the figure in The Skating Minister. I would like to say something about the image actually, because I think this is where a number of art historians have gone wrong with this painting. They've seen it as such an unusual image. They've only seen the image, they've only seen the narrative of the painting, and one really has to come up with a whole series of these similarities to make anything out of it at all. Lying deep in the Scottish borders, Drumlandrig Castle, home of the Duke of Buccleuch, in the family's private collection, built up over many generations, are two rarely seen Scottish portraits by Henri-Pierre d'Enlou. What we have here is a very interesting and unusual portrait of part of a pair as two sergeants. Sergeant Mather here holding the pike, running towards us, and the pair is of Sergeant Stevenson. They're both dressed in the uniform of the Dumfriesshire Militia. d'Enlou is a painter that we know is a very fine draftsman, and many of his drawings do survive, and he works out composition. So we see this very carefully and artfully constructed picture, but of course we're first struck by the originality of the pose. This is one of the great characteristics of d'Enlou, the animated lively pose in motion. So how exactly did d'Enlou end up in Scotland? His journey, like that of most French royalists, was to escape the horrors of the revolution. Leading the exiles was Charles-Philippe Bourbon, known as Monsieur Comte d'Artois. Later he was destined to become the last king of France, but in 1796 he and his reduced entourage were welcomed in Edinburgh. And one of those people who comes up from London to paint a portrait and a series of portraits of the exiled French royal family is d'Enlou, and the key portrait he has to do is of the Comte d'Artois. With d'Enlou in Edinburgh at various times between 1796 and the end of the century, is it possible he also painted the skating minister? Now the French style of painting is to work slowly and to build up the painting, and if you work in different stages on the painting, the paint cracks and it paints in what we call crazy paving. If you can see there are circular patterns, the paint has cracked all over the surface of the painting in a very distinctive French way. Experts in French art who've looked at this painting very closely see a French painting, and this is one of the main reasons why experts have begun to doubt this painting, as by Henry Rayburn, because of the way it's cracked, because of the way the painting has cracked. I'm quite dumbfounded by that, because a painting cracks for a whole variety of reasons, and there's no way you can be scientific about it. It depends on the artist's technique, depends on where the picture has been kept, how much it's been abused, how much it's been cared for. It's totally unpredictable this crackle here, which all old paintings have. Can a forensic examination of the canvas reveal who the artist is or is not? At the Conservation Department of the National Galleries of Scotland, a variety of investigative techniques are used. These include x-raying the painting to see what is happening beneath the layers of paint. What can it tell us about the cracking? The canvas responds to environment, responds to the amount of moisture in the air, so it's continuously in movement, and the ground is relatively inelastic and tends to crack with time, and what you're seeing here is the cracking stemming from the ground. It's completely oblivious of the paint on the surface, virtually. It just goes straight across, makes no distinction what kind of paint is on the surface. Cracking alone cannot be relied upon as evidence of who painted the skating minister, but what about the type of canvas that some insist has no parallel in Rayburn's work? I think I've recorded about 10 out of 200 paintings, so it isn't very common. So, common or not, Rayburn did work with the same type of canvas that was used for the skating minister. They haven't looked carefully enough at the way Rayburn applied the paint to the ground which is on the canvas. They haven't looked at the fabric, they haven't looked at the manufacturing of this wonderful object. They haven't seen his handwriting, and this is where it's so replete with Rayburn's very, very individual handwriting, which I could take you to loads of other Rayburn's and point out exactly the same handwriting. This is Rayburn's signature. The Reverend Robert Walker and Henry Rayburn knew each other as both were trusted members of a select group of men, the Royal Company of Archers, the personal bodyguard of the monarch whenever he or she is in Scotland. What do you see looking at this painting that is distinctively Rayburn-esque? Gosh, it's got so many features of Rayburn in it. I mean, it's a wonderfully textural picture. You know, you can see the crunchy squelchy paint all over it. So, you know, it's got Rayburn's really broad manner encapsulated, all sorts of areas of the picture, foreground to background, but it's also got this very, very fine detail as well that we see in The Skating Minister, for instance. If you concentrate, for instance, on the area of the head and his right arm and glove, you see Rayburn doing things that he does in The Skating Minister. If you look at the very, very fine painting of that chamois glove, the little ridges along the fingers are very carefully depicted. Such a contrast to the way the tree trunk is painted, great broad slabs of paint and these thongs that, I think, tension the fingers, going between the fingers and then tied around the wrist, precisely the way that Rayburn paints the leather straps and the ankle cord on Walker's skating feet. So, the surface texture of the painting here, of this painting, is so different from anything that Don Liu did. Don Liu's paintings have a kind of neoclassical polish and the detail is teased out from wherever he's working, right to the edge of the painting, whereas you can feel that Rayburn, he's not describing in this very careful way. He's finding painterly equivalence for what he's depicting, whereas Don Liu is, in a sense, imitating what he sees as carefully as he can. It's an entirely different manner. It's a French neoclassical manner. Rayburn is doing something entirely different. Don Liu is interested in the precision and the finish and the finesse of detail in a painting and you see this in the pike, you see this in the feather on the top of the hat, you see it in the braiding on the hat, you see it even in the trailing drapery to suggest the movement of the waistband. This is very much a contrast. The ostrich feather, or rather dishevelled ostrich feather in Spenzer's bonnet, you can see that Rayburn has simply, he's worked a lot of fairly loose white paint onto that and to give the sort of broken up texture of the feather, he simply turned his brush around and scored it with the handle. Now this is a technique we find him using in the portrait of the skating minister in the ice. Now here we have, John, an infrared image of the picture. What do you deduce from that? Infrared penetrates as far as the ground and if there's any underdrawing or adjustments they will show if they're on the surface and here it's borne out very well. We can see the fairly extensive restoration around the damage and another damage here. The hat shows up very, very prominently and typically the underlying shape shows more than the surface shape. Well because paint becomes more translucent with age, the first hat, as it were, is now showing through quite prominently. You can actually see with the naked eye the adjustments that he made and he raised the crown of the hat. And it does seem that the artist, and I don't think that there's, I've certainly ruled out the issue of this possibility that there could be two artists, two hands working in the same painting and certainly conservators who've looked at this have absolutely ruled out the fact that could be the case, but there do seem to be changes. They're not seen, there are changes and there are pentimenti and that is a puzzle in the picture. Changes of mind are a characteristic of Rayburn's spontaneous approach to his portraits but are not typical of Donlew who carefully drew his compositions before starting to paint. And you can see too, most interestingly, how he's tightened up the profile of the figure and put a certain emphasis on the curves and the movement of the figure. You can see the liveliness of the brushwork that's gone on. This is somebody who kind of attacks the canvas a bit doesn't he? Yes, yes, and this scale, I mean it's quite adventurous brushwork. It has long been believed that the background to the skating minister depicts Duddingston Loch on the south side of Edinburgh, one of the places the skating club met. However Stephen Lloyd argues that this is wrong. He believes the location is Loch End on the north side of Edinburgh. This is the, where I've argued, where the background, the location for the painting of the skating minister. I mean traditionally always given to Duddingston Loch, the other side of Arthur's Seat about a mile from here. If you look at the background of the painting of the skating minister what you see is this sharp profile or this quite steep hill here of Arthur's Seat and then also you see this kind of quite steep ridge of the source of crags. The two features have obviously have been compressed and then what you see in the background are the Pentland Hills which is this range of hills just to the south of Edinburgh that rise to about 1500 feet. So who was the man who had become the His name was Robert Walker and in 1784 at the age of 29 he was appointed by George III to take up the senior position at the Canongate Church in the heart of Old Edinburgh. With the Palace of Holyrood at one end of his parish and Edinburgh Castle at the other, Walker found himself in the centre of an enlightened new world. Remember this is the time really of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars all coming along. It was also the great time of the huge cauldron bubbling in Edinburgh of all these brilliant minds and people in all the different fields and Walker was part of that set. He was also a kind of outré character Walker I think. Possibly more so, he wasn't quite so perjink as the others I get the feeling because for example I don't know of anybody else who did the kind of things that he did and being painted by a French Catholic painter, if indeed he were, would I think just fit into this kind of wide variety. The palette that he had of activities was extraordinary. He was brought up in Rotterdam. He wrote several books throughout his life. He's an academic and a scholar, a book on golf, a book on the Dutch character as well as sermons. He was a member of the skating club. Oddly enough he's a member of the wagering club and he used to be the minister of Crammond before he came here and his friends made a bet that he would regret ever leaving Crammond within the year. That was actually entered in the books of the wagering club. He won the bet. In common with many other churches at that time, the Canongate church had two ministers. At least one of them was definitely painted by Rayburn. The two ministers worked hand in glove. I suspect that his friend, his colleague Walter Buchanan, did quite a lot of pastoral work but each of them would have services on Sunday. They'd all have funerals, weddings and also the vast social life that ministers had in those days which they saw as part of their ministry. They were in and out amongst the people, the institutions, keeping an eye on society and themselves being much entertained by society and Robert Walker did all that. On February the 25th 1949, lot number 80, now known as the Skating Minister, was purchased by the National Galleries of Scotland for the modest sum of £525 from Christie's in London. One month later, a typewritten letter outlining the history of the painting was sent from Christie's to Edinburgh. That letter was a sworn testimony of Miss Beatrix Scott, the sole surviving great granddaughter of the Reverend Robert Walker. It was given to her lawyer in 1926, shortly before she died. The Rayburn in my possession is the portrait of my great-grandfather, the Reverend Robert Walker, D.D. Minister of Cramond 1770, of Canongate 1784, died June the 30th 1808. He is represented skating on Duddingston Loch and the portrait was painted by Rayburn in 1784. I have always understood that Rayburn considered it his masterpiece, the pose being so good and the lovely frosty atmosphere of the sky and the ice with all the marks of the skates. Dr Walker was a great skater. On his death, Sir Henry Rayburn gave the picture to his widow, my great-grandmother. After her death, it came to my mother. To me, it's a neutral, it's a non-specific piece of evidence. It's a, I think it's a piece of evidence that one has to handle very, very carefully. This description, this very, very, to me this description is over-specific. There are kind of statements about it being given by Rayburn to Walker's widow. That's all the business of the hissing ice. There's a, there's, it's a rather too elaborated description for an 80-year-old woman. It's, to me, it sounds like a, to me, it sounds like a sales pitch. And it contains this kind of warmth about her great-grandfather, the skating minister, and she was obviously very, very conscious of this painting all her life. Have you tested that testimony and the dates that are in it? I mean, how accurate is it? Yes, I've tested a number of these dates, as far as that's been possible, and I can find no mistake among these dates that she's given, and the names of the members of the family. So, we've discovered another document which might be relevant, indeed is relevant to all of this, which is the will of Jean Walker, the Reverend Walker. And I wondered what you made of this. This is a, this is it here in the original handwriting. This is part of the will of Jean Walker, the skating minister's wife, widow. The skating minister's widow, yes. Who died in 1831. Yeah. Could you just have a read of the bits we've highlighted there and give us your impression of what that tells you? And I also direct my said trustees or trustee to deliver to my grandchild, Jean Walker, all the portraits of which I may die possessed. Gosh, that is interesting. Does that help add to the weight of the evidence in Beatrix Scott's testimony? Well, I think it does, actually. The fact that there were portraits of any kind in the family, you know, because one could easily have a will which, you know, was for an estate that didn't contain any pictures, that's quite possible. You know, a Presbyterian minister's family might not contain any pictures, um, and something might not contain any portraits. I find that quite fascinating. Fascinating, yeah. It was only after the Reverend Robert Walker died in 1808 that it was discovered that Henry Rayburn had been appointed as one of the nine trustees of his will. Although both men were in Edinburgh at the same time, to date no evidence has been found that ever met the Reverend Robert Walker. But there is a remarkable twist to the story of the skating minister's family and the last of Robert Walker's descendants. In the late 1870s, another of his great-granddaughters, Margaret, moved to Edinburgh to live with her aunt Janet. When Margaret died, unmarried, her estate was left to her aunt. When she and her husband, the Reverend John Ainslie died, the contents of the Edinburgh home they had all shared were sent for sale to Dowell's auction house in Edinburgh. In November 1896, Lot 91 was sold to a mystery buyer for an auction record sum of £37.16. That painting was described as the late Dr Walker by Henry Rayburn. It has been missing ever since. We shared with Stephen Lloyd this irrefutable proof of the Walker family's connection to Rayburn. I'm slightly puzzled, I must say. I mean, I do think it is very compelling. I mean, I think this does add up. It does make sense, definitely. What it does seem to sort of prove is the Walker-Rayburn connection through that family. And it also, because Rayburn dies in 1823 and the Reverend Robert Walker dies in 1808, and to have the two there together in the same description of a painting, it does increase the chances that it is of our man, the Reverend Robert Walker. And it also strengthens the case that Rayburn did paint a portrait of the Reverend Robert Walker. But you're saying, on this occasion, the more conventional portrait of Robert Walker? Yes, the painting is going to look like that, or it's going to look like that. Could it just be possible that, in addition to the missing painting, there is yet another Walker portrait by Rayburn waiting to be found? We know that Rayburn painted Walter Buchanan, fellow minister to Robert Walker at the Canongate Church. And we also know that Rayburn painted Buchanan's wife as part of a matching pair. Perhaps Jean Walker, the skating minister's widow, also had her portrait painted by Henry Rayburn. Perhaps the portraits of which she died possessed included one of herself, and it now languishes amidst the dozens of unnamed Rayburn portraits scattered across the world, awaiting proper identification. I mean, I personally think that the balance of probabilities, and that's all one can say, is weighted now, I think, in having thought about the picture more, in Rayburn's favour, if I can put it this way. Rayburn, if it's by Rayburn, then he's painting in a format favoured by Don Lue. But if it's by Don Lue, he's painting in a style practised by Rayburn. Now it's more likely, to my mind, that you could paint in another artist's format, than paint in a style which is really quite different from the rest of your work. I still think it's a painter painting like Rayburn, rather than a painter painting like Don Lue. The degree of detail in Don Lue is simply not here. The degree of finish isn't here. So a painting that some people have thought is atypical, it is atypical. It does have his signature, and has become a kind of signature work in Rayburn's career. And I see no good reason to remove it from that position.