Henry Raeburn

Scotland's best-loved portrait is a small, strange thing: a minister in black, arms folded, gliding across a frozen loch on one skate. The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch stayed in the sitter's family and was barely known until 1949, when it surfaced and quickly became a national image. It is usually given to Henry Raeburn, though not everyone agrees. One curator has argued the picture fits the French painter Henri-Pierre Danloux, who was working in Edinburgh in the 1790s, while the National Galleries of Scotland still stand by Raeburn.

Whoever painted that skater, Raeburn was the portraitist of his city. Largely self-taught, he worked without preparatory drawings, building a face straight onto the canvas in broad, square-loaded strokes of the brush, often with the light coming from behind his sitter.

Nearly everyone of consequence in Enlightenment Edinburgh sat for him, from judges and professors to the writer Walter Scott. He was knighted in 1822 when George IV visited the city, and appointed the King's official painter in Scotland the year before he died.