Excerpt from Sir Henry Raeburn
As in the case of many of the Old Masters, a biographer of Sir Henry Raeburn, when weighing the trustworthy material at his command, has no reason to complain of an embarras de richesse. All along the line of his predecessors, from first to last, an author finds cause to suspect the true value of the facts - so called for courtesy's sake - out of which the life of the great Scots painter has been built. His attention, accordingly, is chiefly absorbed by the cross-examination of witnesses, and, by dividing the actual from the probable, many colouring passages, besides Cunningham's pretty romance of Raeburn's marriage, come in the end to be rejected.
The most important part of an artist's biography I take to be that treating of his early environment, the birth of the art-instinct or genius, his artistic education, and his acquisition of a style. Of none of these is much known in the case of Raeburn. This has led some of his critics and biographers, more particularly R. A. M. Stevenson and Sir Walter Armstrong, into a great deal of assumption. They argue from probabilities, and their endeavour is both mistaken and hopeless.
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