The Rest Is History - Greatest Paintings: Age of Enlightenment - Raeburn's Skating Minister

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

How does Henry Raeburn’s Skating Minister represent both the Scottish Enlightenment and the Romantic movement? In what ways does subject Reverend Robert Walker’s personal history connect to the famous Dutch Golden Age? And, how did a controversy about the most reproduced image in Scotland  traumatise the Scottish national identity?  In this new The Rest Is History Club series, Tom is joined by art critic and author Laura Cumming to discuss the histories behind famous paintings and put them in their historical contexts. To hear the full episode, and all the other exclusive new episodes from Laura and Tom's paintings  series, coming out every Wednesday for the next four weeks, join The Rest is History Club at therestishistory.com To hear these exclusive new episodes from Laura and Tom every Wednesday for the next four weeks, join The Rest is History Club at ⁠therestishistory.com⁠.  NEXT WEEK… Jan 23rd: The Angelus - Jean-François Millet  _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek + Harry Swan Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello everyone. Tom Holland here and I am joined by the great Laura coming 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. 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 coming 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 and he's just made a room. 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. 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. Just for those very few who, who have no idea who the skating minister is, what it looks like. Just describe it.

Pitch black, silhouetted figure of a minister, Church of Scotland, very black clothes, skating on Duddingson Loch, and he's on one leg, the other leg behind him, like a ballet dancer. His arms are crossed. It's called the travelling 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 emotionless and yet, of course, he's moving.

He's gliding. And so it's a great comic painting in my view. Yes. 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. But behind him, I mean, it's romanticism at its most romantic. And I guess there's, again, the kind of attention there is key to understanding the painting. Absolutely right. And if you took the figure away and just imagine this exquisite sort of silvery gold, distant, 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, it's not in the highlands, but it looks like something out

of Ossian or something. I know, it really does. And, you know, this 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. 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 hell far. Thank you for listening. Subscribe to The Restless History Club at the Restless History.com for the entire episode. And Laura and I will be back next week for our final episode in this series when we will be looking at the Angeles by Jean-François Millet, mid-ninth century painting, haunting, full of mystery. And if you want to hear that, well, go and sign it. help. Troy, the Odyssey, the Iliad, all of these great ancient epics depict a monumental

claps that destroyed the interconnected empires of 3,000 years ago. And to understand the Bronze Age apocalypse that Homer wrote about 400 years after it happened, subscribe to Empire. World History, a fellow gollhanger podcast where we are deep diving into the biggest imperial claps in ancient history. To get a flavor of the series, here is a clip from our episode with none other than Stephen Fry. It is a great. one of my favorite subjects, the story of the Greeks and the Siege of Troy and Odysseus' return home, of course. I say Greeks. Homer called them the Achaeans, the Danians, the Argyves. The word Greeks is a much later one, but it refers really to the Mycenaeans, a warrior aristocracy,

essentially, obsessed with honor and reputation that would give them an eternal glory, a cleos, as they called it. It's the Cleos that's in the name of so many Greeks. you know, Cleopatra and all the... I haven't worked then out. That's the same word. Heracles, who's Hercules, you know, Heera's Glory. He was actually named Heracles because she hated him because he was a love child of Zeus and she never liked Zeus's love child, her husband, her errant husband.

And so as an attempt to placate her, Tariasius, because he was born in Thebes, suggested that he changed his name, as a baby, this was, to Heracles, the glory of Hera. But it didn't help much. help at all. And then Athena even put her on Hera's breast when here it was asleep because it would bond them if he suckled her milk. But she woke and saw it and tossed him away and her breast milk spread across the sky to form the milky way. I didn't know that story. Because galaxy, of course, is from the Greek for milk, galactic, as in lactic. So the chocolate makers are right. Anyway, this is completely separate.

Keep going. Keep going. Don't stop. Well, we really hope you enjoyed that clip. Here more on the Bronze Age Apocalypse and how it shaped the ancient Greek epics. Just subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts.