Robert Burns/Portrait

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Artwork: Robert Burns
Artist: Alexander Nasmyth
Created: 1787
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 38 x32 cm
Location: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh,, Uk “Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840) has been dubbed the “father of Scottish landscape painting,” but no other work he painted is as well known as this portrait of Scotland’s most famous poet. It was commissioned by Edinburgh publisher William Creech to adorn a new edition of Burns’s poems in 1787, but Burns Nasmyth were already good friends before the sittings. A half-length portrait framed in an oval, the picture shows Burns confident and well dressed, a trace of amusement around his eyes and lips. The landscape background, suggestive of Burns’s native Ayrshire, supplies a note of melancholy. It is Romantic portrait, identifying the poet with nature and self-will, but tempered by a flavour of Enlightenment rationalism. The picture he’s been left partially unfinished because Nasmyth stopped painting once he was satisfied with what he had achieved. (RG)
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