Introduction

Abstract

In The Scarborough Miscellany of 1732, the Edinburgh poet and bookseller Allan Ramsay included a short address to his son of the same name, who had recently commenced his career as a portraitist in London. The poem begins by praising the ‘Young Painter’ for the vividness of his style and the mimetic precision and conviction of his account of his sitter, ‘so for thy Labour, well design’d,/ May all thy outward Form display’. Ramsay the elder was exceptionally supportive of his son and enduringly proud of his achievements as an artist, but the central purpose of this address was to assert the claims of literature, and poetry in particular, above those of the visual arts, such that painting could not satisfactorily and convincingly reveal a sense of inner being; ‘Pencils’, he states bluntly, ‘Cannot paint the Mind’; they cannot illuminate the subject with such a searching light as to be able to display comprehensively ‘his Courage, Learning, and his Wit’.¹ It is perfectly possible to argue against the prior claims of literature for personal insight and exposure on both general and specific grounds: that painting as a representative medium is no less capable of complex personal revelation than its literary counterpart; and that the case can also be made for examples of Ramsay’s portraiture (including his self and family portraiture) being exceptionally revealing in these respects. Yet it should also be acknowledged that beyond the absolute capabilities of expressiveness, it would, on occasion, be in the interests of a society portraitist like Ramsay, dependent on his clients’ approval for his income, not to reveal, but rather to disguise, what he detected as the defining characteristics of his sitters.