Artwork Information

James Hay's father was George Hay, of the firm Hunter and Hay of Madras. Painted between 1790 and 1796, this superb portrait focuses on the boy's face as a mirror of character. In a review of 1911 a Times critic described Raeburn as like many Scotsmen, 'more French than English, and one feels that nearly all his best portraits are conceived as David or Ingres would have conceived them, but that the original conception is overlayed and obscured by English romanticism'.