Stop and Look: The Rev. Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch by Danloux

Many years ago I was asked by the British Council to put together an exhibition of British paintings for display in the Prado in Madrid. The occasion was the first (and only) visit of a British monarch to Spain, so it was a prestigious event of national significance. The Prado, moreover, contains one of the most important of all collections of European painting, so we British would be on our mettle to measure up to the daunting competition.  

The run-up time was rather short, so I was grateful to learn that the British Council had already confirmed some loans to the show. One picture that had been agreed was a famous image: the painting of a gentleman, thought to be the Rev. Robert Walker, skating, which had become over many years truly an ‘icon’ of Scottish art. It was well known as a work by the great Scottish portrait-painter Sir Henry Raeburn, but I happened to have serious doubts as to that attribution. Raeburn’s style is easily recognizable, with its broad florid brush-strokes and bold characterisations. The Rev. Robert is presented in a very different language, of tight, precise draughtsmanship and smooth finished handling. 

But there was little time for connoisseurly arguments: the show must go on, and besides the Raeburn attribution was so firmly, not to say passionately, adhered to by everyone in Scotland that to question it would have been to open a huge can of patriotic worms. I couldn’t put my finger on an alternative artist, so I had perforce to go along with the inclusion of the picture in the show. What was particularly embarrassing was that it didn’t look to me like a British hand at all. So I put my name as general editor to the accepted attribution, and the picture was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue.

Those details were duly noted by an able and brave former curator at Edinburgh, Stephen Lloyd, who has now come up with the real author of the picture: the Frenchman Henri-Pierre Danloux, who was working in Britain, and particularly in Edinburgh, over the decade from 1792 when he fled France during the Revolution. There are several portraits by Danloux in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. He wasn’t so far away, therefore, and there’s no doubt he is the painter of this picture with its refined, decidedly neo-classical outlines and subdued palette.  

Besides being a Minister of the Church of Scotland, Robert Walker (1755-1808) was a keen sportsman, a member of the Royal Company of Archers as well as of the Edinburgh Skating Club, which regularly met on Duddingston Loch, the generally accepted location of his portrait. It’s assumed that he had learned to skate while his father was minister at the Scots Church in Rotterdam, though of course there’s no shortage of ice in Scotland: the association with the Netherlands is perhaps a tiny bit glib.   

Danloux’s authorship of the picture is still not generally admitted because the Scots are almost as possessive of the work as they are of the poems of Rabbie Burns. And Raeburn was indeed among Walker’s trustees, so the mistake is quite understandable – except for the evidence of the actual style of the painting. It’s such a universally known and loved image that it suits the Scots to go on believing it is by a great Scottish painter rather than by a visiting (and relatively minor) Frenchman. But it’s still a fine picture. And I believe accurate attribution is important: it constitutes the essential documentation on which art historians found their work, which must be as firmly grounded in fact as the documentation of any other part of history. 

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