er he was elected an
Academician. It is of course only with the later visits that we have
to do in this connection. By that time Hoppner was dead, and
Lawrence's claim to be painter par excellence to the fashionable world
was undisputed. No doubt the Scottish painter would be attracted by
the technical accomplishment of Lawrence's work; but he was between
fifty and sixty years of age and little likely to be influenced by an
art, which, for all its brilliance, was meretricious in many respects.
Yet it is possible that the adulation lavished by society upon his
contemporary's style may have induced him to consider if something of
the elegance for which it was esteemed so highly could not be added
with advantage to his own. On the other hand, Scottish society was
gradually undergoing evolution, and, while a greater infusion of
fashion amongst its members would in itself tend to stimulate the
favourite painter of the day in the same direction, increase in wealth
would bring a greater number of younger sitters to his studio.
Probably a combination of these represents the influences which
affected Raeburn. In any case, his later portraits, especially of
women, possess qualities of charm and beauty which, while never merely
pretty or meretricious, connect them in some measure with the more
modish and less sincere and virile work of Lawrence. But
otherwise--and, unlike his southern contemporaries, he never sacrificed
character to elegance or subordinated individuality to type--the
evolution of his style continued on purely personal lines. The
pictures painted between 1810 and his death, while still at the height
of his powers, are essentially one with those of the preceding decade.
There is in them a more delicate sense of beauty than before, and his
portraits of ladies are marked by a quickened perception of feminine
grace and charm; but these are results of the natural development of
his nature and of his personal powers of expression rather than of any
radical alteration in his standpoint.

As regards the work of the last fifteen years and more, it is less
increased grasp of character, for that had always been a leading trait,
than growth in the expressive power and completeness of his technique
that is the dominating factor. And here the prevailing qualities are
but the issue of previous experience. His modelling ceases to be
marked by the rough-hewn and over simplified planes which had
distinguished his incisive