Portrait of a Man with Gray Hair

Sir Henry Raeburn · 1810–20

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

73.6 × 62.8 cm (29 × 24 3/4 in.); Framed: 96.6 × 84.5 × 8.3 cm (38 × 33 1/4 × 3 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Portrait of a Man with Gray Hair is one of those quiet, penetrating works that rewards a long look — the subject's weathered bearing and steady gaze suggesting a life fully lived, rendered with the directness Raeburn brought to all his best portraits. Sir Henry Raeburn was the leading Scottish portrait painter of his era, the man who put the faces of the Scottish Enlightenment on canvas. His technique was unusually bold for the time: he often worked without preparatory sketches, applying paint directly in what contemporaries called his "square touch" — confident, blocky brushstrokes that give his portraits an immediacy that smoother academic painting rarely achieves. In this work, the sitter's face emerges from a shadowed background with the kind of psychological presence that made Raeburn the painter of choice for Edinburgh's professional classes. Raeburn was knighted by George IV in 1822 during the king's celebrated visit to Scotland — the first by a reigning monarch in nearly two centuries — formally recognising him as the country's preeminent artist. Our hand-painted oil reproduction faithfully recreates Raeburn's characteristic handling of light and texture, preserving the quiet authority of the Art Institute of Chicago original and bringing it into your home on canvas, stroke by stroke.