This delightful little sketch by Henry Raeburn depicts Louisa Mackay, a substantial Scottish landowner of her time. She was born the daughter of Colin Campbell of Glenure (1708–1752), known as “The Red Fox”. He was a factor, whose job was to oversee the running of several substantial estates, which had been forfeited to the Crown by clan chieftains who had supported the Stewart succession in the 1745 rebellion. These estates had then been controversially given to those who had supported the King in those times. In 1752 Campbell was famously shot in the back and killed by one of the Stewart supporters. This episode of Scottish history was picked up by the author Robert Louis Stevenson and became central to the plot of his famous novel Kidnapped. Louisa, an infant at the time of her father’s killing, later married a distant relative Colonel George Mackay. Louisa, through her mother, another Mackay, came to inherit part of the sprawling estate of Bighouse in Scotland. Her husband later purchased the rest of it. Retaining full title to her portion of the estate, she was formally and memorably referred to as ‘The Portioner of Bighouse’.

Raeburn was of course one of the great masters of Scottish portraiture, so it is not surprising that a wealthy Scot such as Louisa Mackay would sit to him for her portrait. His finished portrait of her (Private Collection) is a formidable essay in powerful composition and its image has been much reproduced. But that Raeburn sketched this composition out on a small scale first is something of a rarity in his oeuvre. It is well known that he almost always drew with his brushes straight onto the final canvas when he began a sitting. This fluid little picture, sketching out Raeburn’s future composition with free and quick strokes of the brush, gives us an insightful and welcome view of this unusual side to his working practices.