Greatest Paintings: Age of Enlightenment - Raeburn's Skating Minister

0:02Hello, everyone.

0:03Tom Holland:Tom Holland here, and I am joined by the great Laura Cumming, and we are looking at painting in history, four paintings that reflect a particular period in history. We'll be looking at the history of the painting itself, the life of the artist, and teasing out the mysteries that shadow all four paintings. Today's painting, it's The Skating Minister by Henry Rayburn, the most famous painting in Scottish history, a painting that tells us about the Enlightenment, about Romanticism, and also, of course, about skating.

0:48Tom Holland:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our ongoing series for you, our beloved club members on great paintings, how they are situated in history, the story behind them, the story of the person who painted them, all of that kind of thing. We've been to Bruges in the 15th century. We've been to Madrid in the 17th century. And now we are going to Edinburgh in the late 18th century. And Laura Cumming with me. Laura, you are Scottish. You are from Edinburgh. And I am a Scottish landowner. So basically, I'm basically Scottish as well. You're basically my boss. Yeah. And I can see Theo, who purports to be French, sitting in the producer's booth.

1:35Tom Holland:And he's just made a rude gesture at that. So we're in a very Scottish mood today. And actually, the painting you've chosen is the national painting for Scotland, isn't it? So what is it? Who painted it? Tell us about it.

1:47Laura Cumming:It's the Skating Minister, painted by Henry Rabin, or was it, in 1795. And it is absolutely the painting of Scotland. It's the one painting that everybody who's listening now, I think, can probably associate with my nation.

2:05Tom Holland:Just for those very few who have no idea who the Skating Minister is, what it looks like, just describe it.

2:10Laura Cumming:pitch black silhouetted figure of a minister, Church of Scotland, very black clothes, skating on Duddingston Loch. And he's on one leg, the other leg behind him, like a ballet dancer. His arms are crossed. It's called the traveling pose, in fact, as skaters will know. And he's crossing the loch and behind him is this unbelievable sort of frosty, romantic, misty distance. And the painting is, to me, not just a perfect logo of itself. And if you grew up in Scotland, you knew this painting very well. It was everywhere. It would pass you on buses, which was an additional joke because the great thing about this figure is that he is apparently motionless.

2:56Laura Cumming:And yet, of course, he's moving, he's gliding. And so it's a great comic painting in my view. Yes.

3:02Tom Holland:So there are two things that strike me about it immediately. The first is the note of comedy, because he is looking intensely serious. He has the look of a man who is drawing up his sermon. And yet, as you say, the contrast between the figure he makes as a skater and his incredible dignity is inherently comic. But the other source of tension, which I imagine we're going to be teasing out over the course of this episode, is the fact that even though he's a minister, he kind of looks an emblem of the Scottish Enlightenment. He's sober, he's serious, he's a scholar. That's all kind of implicit in his appearance.

3:40Tom Holland:But behind him, I mean, it's romanticism at its most romantic. And I guess there's, again, the kind of the tension there is key to understanding the painting.

3:50Laura Cumming:Absolutely right. And if you took the figure away and just imagine this exquisite sort of silvery, gold, distant fog and mist, and you can feel the kind of temperature reverberating in the air there and so on, and the ice below. This was a part of Edinburgh, a loch in Edinburgh that froze over all the time. Right, because this is in Edinburgh.

4:11Tom Holland:It's not in the Highlands, but it looks like something out of Ossian or something, doesn't it?

4:15Laura Cumming:It really does. And, you know, these sort of craggy, shadowy shapes in the distance and so on. And if you took him away, you could be looking at, well, I think you could be looking at, you know, a sort of German or yes, a Turner, but I was thinking more German painting, you know, of that era. And there he is. And you've got him so well. His face. Oh, you know, he's definitely getting down to, you know, probity and piety. And, you know, he's going to tell someone off and it's going to be a hellfire.

4:43Tom Holland:thank you for listening subscribe to the rest is history club at the rest is history.com for the entire episode and laura and i will be back next week for our final episode in the series when we will be looking at the angelus by jean-francois millet mid-19th century painting haunting full of mystery and if you want to hear that well go and sign up

5:16I'll see you next time.

5:41Laura Cumming:よしお勧めで リペルトを押していく supervisorあなたの隣をお激しビルトを拒否を見ていきます加速

6:01ビルトを拒否 を見ていきます 加速 Das拍機をお dép��させして Thank you.