It is not at all in originality of general conception that the greatness of Raeburn’s portraiture usually lies, in the novel groupings of its figures, or in any suggestion of story in their combinations. Some other painters have contrived to throw a hint of narrative into works which, in first and main aim, were mere likenesses; but Raeburn was a portraitist in the strictest and most exclusive sense; and he simply adopted the accepted poses of the figure that were current in the Scottish portraiture of his day, though to these his original genius gave a finer grace, catching from Nature an added ease. But in the grouping of this picture, and in its lighting—so abnormal in arrangement—we certainly have as definite a departure as could well be imagined, from the stock traditions that have guided the art of portraiture from time immemorial; and some other reason than a purely technical one is suggested by the marked originality of the work, in both conception and treatment. Was this strange and most unusual distribution of light in the picture a mere artistic experiment in chiaroscuro? Did the painter devote half of his canvas to an extended landscape vista, merely in honour of the Baronet’s ancestral acres; and was that pose of regardant countenance and interlacing arms selected only because it made for a graceful flow of changeful line? Hardly was all this the case, one fancies. May it not, then, be conceivable that when the portrait had been commissioned, and while its details and way of treatment were being discussed by the pair—painter and baronet—as they sat together, in quiet after-dinner hour over their wine, in this very room where the completed picture now holds its place,—is it not just conceivable that Sir John, in some such time of genial heart-expansion, as he poised his glass to catch the last warm gleam of summer evening light that streamed across the darkening woods,—that the childless man, beginning now to verge gently towards age, may have been stirred by ancient memories, and have told the artist of some bygone scene to which these ancestral woods were once the witness? Is it a walk of plighted lovers that the painter hints at on his canvas, and has the bride just caught first sight of her future home? Or, can the scene be one tenderer still? The middle-aged lover looks—calmly, earnestly expectant, waiting for an answer that will not come from the lady’s lips, that will certainly not be given by their _words_—at the noble face of the mature and stately beauty by his side, into her dear grey eyes that never meet his, but gaze right on into the distance—into the future is it? Has the painter then meant to show us one of those strenuous, delicately-poised moments that come in mortal lives, when “words are mere mistake,” when “A lip’s mere tremble, Looks half hesitation, cheeks just change of colour,”