Jean-François Raffaëlli

Alexander Reid, Glasgow (and sold, his sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, June 10, 1898, lot 46, illustrated)
Georges Petit, Paris (acquired at the above sale)
George A. Gay
Gifted from the above to the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford in 1941

Barbara Fields, Jean-François Raffaëlli (1850-1924): The Naturalist Artist, Ann Arbor, Michigan, (Ph.D. diss), 1979, p. 342

This is painted on a stable board, mounted to a support frame. Possibly dirty or discoloured due to old varnish. Under UV, inpainting along the top is evident and likely due to frame abrasions.
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Raffaëlli is well known for his impressions of Paris and the portraits of its people, as outlined in his treaty on caractérisme, but he was an intrepid traveler, touring Europe and the United States on multiple occasions in his career. In the present work, Raffaëlli has set up his easel in front of Scotland's Register House, which is now the National Archives of Scotland (the monument to the left is the statue of the 1st Duke of Wellington), and renders a view looking east along Princess street towards Calton Hill.

The plaza is bustling and Raffaëlli does not waste any opportunity to evoke the spirit of the place which he paints with verve and sophistication. He uses a very limited palette of chromatic greys, with punches of red and blue that activate the whole composition. He shows mastery of his materials with both wet and dry mark-making and likely with his trademark batônet Raffaëlli. The unique flavor of Edinburgh is emphasized by the people and their costumes: men in kilts, the poor barefoot youth, women and children in their best outfits, and a bus pulled by horses carrying piled up passengers down what is still the city's main thoroughfare.

The first recorded owner of this painting was Alexander Reid (1854-1928), the influential Glaswegian art dealer. He left Scotland in the 1880s to work in Paris for the art house of Boussod & Valadon, where he became friends with Theo van Gogh, brother of Vincent (whose portrait of Reid still hangs in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery).  In 1888, Reid returned to Glasgow and set up his own gallery, promoting the friends that he had made abroad including Monet, Manet and Degas. Many of the French Impressionist paintings that hang in Glasgow museums passed through Reid's doors.

It is likely that Reid was the reason Raffaëlli visited Scotland, where he exhibited twice in the 1890s (Millet to Matisse, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century French Painting from Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow, 2002, p. 6). This is not the only known work from his time there, as he painted Pecheurs d'Écosse during the summer of 1892 and exhibited it the following year at the Paris Salon (no. 839) (Fields, pp. 258, 342). Both works showcase Raffaëlli's characteristic and virtuoso paint handling as well as his incisive insight into the world and people around him.