Velasquez and Hals and comparatively recent times. Of course at this early stage his technical accomplishment was not at all equal to his frankness of vision. His drawing, although expressing character, was uncertain and not fully constructive; his sense of design was rather stiff and occasionally somewhat archaic in character; his handling and modelling, if broad and courageous, were insufficiently supported by knowledge; his colour was apt to be dull and monotonous, or, when breaking from that, patchy and crude in its more definite notes which do not fuse sufficiently with their surroundings.

Gradually these deficiencies were mastered, but in some degree they persist in most of the comparatively few portraits which can be said with certainty to have been painted before he went to Italy. He had been in no hurry to go. Ever since marriage with one of his sitters in 1778, when he was only twenty-two, his future had been secure. The lady, neé Ann Edgar of Bridgelands, Peebleshire, brought him a considerable fortune. The widow of James Leslie—who traced his descent to Sir George Leslie, first Baron of Balquhain (1351), and who, after his purchase of Deanhaugh in 1777,[1] was spoken of as "Count of Deanhaugh"—she was twelve years the artist's senior, and had three children; but the marriage turned out most happily for all concerned. Raeburn went to live at his wife's property, which lay not far from his brother's house and factory at Stockbridge, and, although sitters increased with his growing reputation until he is said to have been quite independent of his wife's income, he does not appear to have had a separate studio. Probably his Edinburgh clients went to Deanhaugh, and at times he seems to have painted portraits at the country houses of the gentry. But in 1785 desire to see and learn more than was possible at home took him to Italy. While in London he made the acquaintance of Reynolds, in whose studio he may have worked for a few weeks, and Sir Joshua's advice confirming his original intention, Raeburn and his wife went to Rome, where they resided about two years. When parting Reynolds took him aside and whispered: "Young man, I know nothing about your circumstances. Young painters are seldom rich; but if money be necessary for your studies abroad, say so, and you shall not want it." Money was not needed, but letters of introduction were accepted gladly; and "ever afterwards Raeburn mentioned the name of Sir Joshua with much respect."

[1] If, as stated by Cumberland Hill in his History of Stockbridge, Leslie bought Deanhaugh in 1777, and if, as stated by Cunningham and others, Raeburn married in 1778, the lady can have been a widow for only a few months.

IV.

In these days of rapid travel, the transition from north to south is exceedingly striking. Leaving London one speeds past the pleasant Surrey fields and lanes and woodlands, and through the soft rolling green downs, and in the afternoon and evening sees the less familiar but not strange wide planes and poplar-fringed rivers of Northern France, to open one's eyes next morning upon the brown sun-baked lands, with their strange southern growths, which lie behind Marseilles; and all day as the train thunders along the Riviera, through olive gardens and vineyards, one has glimpses of strangely picturesque white-walled and many-coloured shuttered towns fringing the broad bays or clustering on the rocks above little harbours, and drinks a strange enchantment from great vistas of lovely coast washed by blue waters and gladdened by radiant sunshine. And on the second morning, issuing into the great square before the station, you have your first sight of Rome.

PLATE VI.—JOHN TAIT OF HARVIESTON AND HIS GRANDSON. (Mrs Pitman.)

One of the artist's most virile and trenchant performances, it was painted in 1798-9. The child was introduced after the grandfather's death. (See p. 63.)

Yet impressive as these transitions are, they are nothing to the contrast which Rome presented to the stranger from the north in the eighteenth century when, after slow and long and weary travelling, he reached his goal. Then Rome was still a town of the renaissance imposed upon a city of the ancients; and under the aegis of the Papacy preserved aspects of life and character which differed little from those of three or four centuries earlier. After the grey metropolis of the north, with its softly luminous or cloudy skies, its sombreness of aspect, its calvinistic religious atmosphere, its interest in science and philosophy, and its want of interest in the arts, the clear sunshiny air of the Eternal City, its picturesque and crowded life, its gorgeous ecclesiastical ceremonies and processions, its monuments of art and architecture, and its cosmopolitan coteries of eager dilettanti discussing the latest archaeological discoveries, and of artists studying the achievements of the past, must have formed an extraordinary contrast, Yet Raeburn, much as these novel and stirring surroundings would strike him, remained true to his own impressions of reality and was unaffected in his artistic ideals. Almost alone of the foreign artists then resident in Rome, he was unaffected by the pseudo-classicism which prevailed. In part a product of emasculated academic tradition, and in part the result of philosophical speculations, upon which the discoveries at Pompeii and the excavations then taking place in Rome had had a strong influence, it was an attitude which founded itself upon the past and opposed the direct study of nature. Gavin Hamilton (1723-98) and Jacob More (1740?-93) two of its most conspicuous pictorial exponents were Scots by birth, but they had lived so long abroad that Scotland had become to them little more than a memory. The work of the former was in many ways an embodiment of the current dilettante conception of art, and kindred in kind, though earlier in date, to that of Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) under whose sway, towards the close of the century, classic ideals came to dominate the art of Europe outside these isles. His usefulness to Raeburn was chiefly that of a cicerone. There was little of an archaeological kind with which he was unacquainted, and he was so famous a discoverer of antiquities that the superstitious Romans thought that he was in league with the devil. The landscapes of More, though highly praised by Goethe, would appeal to Raeburn little more than did the "sublime" historical designs of Hamilton. They were but dilutions, frequently flavoured with melodramatic sentiment, of the noble convention formulated by Claude and the Poussins. Raeburn, on the other hand, had looked at man and nature inquiringly, and had evolved a manner of expressing the results of his observation for himself. Moreover he was past the easily impressionable age, and turned his opportunities to direct and practical uses. He used to declare that the advice of James Byres (1734-1818?) of Tonley, who, in Raeburn's own words, was "a man of great general information, a profound antiquary, and one of the best judges perhaps of everything connected with art in Great Britain," was the most valuable lesson he received while abroad. "Never paint anything except you