Scottish portraiture has two indisputable heavyweight champions. While there’s no need for them to be in competition with each other – no trash talk, please – in the human corner, let’s hear it for the Reverend Robert Walker, better known as The Skating Minister (c. 1795) by Henry Raeburn. And, in the large land mammal corner, please give a resounding roar for Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen (1851).
When it came to deciding which of these Scottish icons to imitate, the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) plausibly offers World Skating Day – 14 December, for those who can manage a triple axle or two – as the reason to plump for Reverend Walker, minister of the Canongate Kirk and mainstay of the Edinburgh Skating Society.
Rakewell wonders, however, if the decision to pose not one, but seven ministers on the George Street ice rink in Edinburgh was a more practical one. The red deer stag is, after all, not known for following instructions. When your roving correspondent asked the NGS press office whether the seven synchronised skaters were ordained ministers, like Raeburn’s original, the press office confirmed that ‘the people in the photos are National Galleries of Scotland staff who volunteered to take part in the photos.’ That’s the spirit we like to see! Megafauna of the Highlands: it’s your move.
