The appearance at auction of this evasive canvas allows us for the first time to confidently confirm the portrait’s traditional attribution to Sir Henry Raeburn. Previously, only weak images of the portrait were available for study, resulting in the portrait being excluded from the first version of David Mackie’s complete catalogue of Raeburn’s work (1994).
The painting had, however, entered the early literature on the artist. Firstly, in the catalogue of the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition of 1863 and secondly, in the catalogue of the unsurpassed Raeburn exhibition held at Edinburgh in 1876, when Colonel Allan’s portrait was still in the hands of his family. But there was no visual evidence of the portrait from those times. The subsequent Raeburn literature essentially duplicates the work of Sir James L. Caw of 1901 and consequently there is little strength in the published records of this work after that date. That applies to most of Raeburn’s paintings and holds true until the mid-1990s. Caw is likely to have known the painting, as he was based in Edinburgh and the painting was still in the city at the time he wrote. After that date, we know little of the painting’s ownership history until the mid-1930s, when it appeared on the London and New York art markets, some years after the Raeburn craze had ended with the Wall Street Crash in 1929. The painting was then published for the first time. But the available photographs were of insufficient quality to either confirm or reject the attribution with confidence. Those photographs wrongly suggested that the portrait carried a degree of heightened expression that is more in keeping with Raeburn’s imitators. Early photographs of the artist’s work seem sometimes to carry retouching by the photographer. The portrait’s subsequent history in the middle of the twentieth century remains somewhat fragmentary, but it entered the collection of Mr. and Mrs. J. Howard Pew, in whose hands it was by 1950, but they may have acquired it much earlier. With its reappearance, former doubt is dispersed regarding Raeburn’s authorship.
The sitter’s large, dreamy eyes, the uncommonly high shirt collar and the virtuoso handling in the uniform all suggest a very late date for the portrait. It bears some resemblance in the painting of the uniform to Sir John James Scott-Douglas 3rd Bart (1792-1836), (documented payment to the artist’s heirs, ‘[1823] November 24 Sir John Douglas £262 10. [shillings]’, collection National Army Museum, London, Mackie number 215). Similar deftness and skill in the treatment of a complicated uniform are also seen in a portrait formerly in the Baron Lambert collection, Brussels, Major Robert MacDonald RHA o’ Inchkenneth and Gribune (1777-1856) (still in Raeburn’s studio, 1824; Anonymous sale; Vanderkindere, Brussels, 13 January 2015, lot 95; Anonymous sale, Sotheby’s, London, 9 July 2015, lot 221; Mackie number 480). A date of circa 1820-23 for Colonel Allan’s portrait seems likely; it is presented here on the art market for only the second time in its history and is one of Raeburn's last paintings.
The portrait will now be included in David Mackie’s forthcoming complete catalogue of Raeburn's works.