Il pastore pattinatore

This was painted around 1795 in Edinburgh, in the years people call the Scottish Enlightenment, when the city's ministers, lawyers and philosophers all knew one another and belonged to the same clubs. The skater is the Reverend Robert Walker, a Church of Scotland minister and a member of the Edinburgh Skating Society, the oldest in Britain, which met on the frozen loch at Duddingston outside town. He had grown up partly in Rotterdam, and he wears the Dutch-style skates to match. What looks like an easy glide is in fact a difficult figure, one his fellow skaters would have recognised at once. The painting stayed with Walker's family and was barely known until 1949. Some scholars have since questioned whether Henry Raeburn painted it at all, though the gallery holds to his name.