Sev­er­al times, in a for­mer job role, I had occa­sion to trav­el by train to Edinburgh’s Waver­ley Sta­tion and from thence to our site in Liv­ingston, where I would do my thing, stay overnight, and make the return jour­ney home the next day. Although usu­al­ly the booked train tick­ets allowed lit­tle room for extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties, there was one occa­sion on which I man­aged to engi­neer a cou­ple of spare hours to vis­it Edinburgh’s Nation­al Gallery. It’s a five-minute walk from Waver­ley Sta­tion, past the Wal­ter Scott mon­u­ment and along Princes Street Gar­dens, and it is well worth the effort.

One of the more unusu­al of its col­lec­tion is Hen­ry Raeburn’s The Skat­ing Min­is­ter. Paint­ed around 1790, it depicts the Rev­erend Robert Walk­er, min­is­ter at Edinburgh’s Canon­gate Kirk, skat­ing on Dud­dingston Loch. It was prac­ti­cal­ly unknown until 1949 (when it was acquired), but has since become some­thing of an icon of Scot­tish cul­ture, paint­ed as it was dur­ing the Scot­tish Enlight­en­ment. It is today rare for Dud­dingston Loch to be suf­fi­cient­ly frozen for skat­ing, but in the Lit­tle Ice Age that encom­passed the 18th cen­tu­ry, the loch was the favourite meet­ing place of the Edin­burgh Skat­ing Club, of whom Robert Walk­er was a promi­nent mem­ber.

Sir Hen­ry Rae­burn was Edinburgh’s own, too. Born in Stock­bridge, a for­mer vil­lage now part of Edin­burgh, he was respon­si­ble for some thou­sand por­traits of Scotland’s great and good. He was dis­in­clined to leave his native land and, as a result, his renown in Scot­land is not matched in Eng­land where the names of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gains­bor­ough dom­i­nate the por­trai­ture of the peri­od. But in the Scot­tish Nation­al Gallery, he is far from for­got­ten, and his Skat­ing Min­is­ter will remain a firm favourite there for years to come.