George Jamesone: Painter of Kings

Charles I’s royal visit to Edinburgh in 1633 was met with an extravagant procession through the streets of the city, capped with a series of triumphal arches showing portraits of more than one hundred of the past kings of Scotland. George Jamesone (c.1587-1644), who had established himself as a portrait painter of considerable repute in his hometown of Aberdeen, was tasked with completing these portraits. The resulting series was met with acclaim from the public and Charles I, thus giving Jamesone national fame.

Less than a quarter of the portraits from this celebration are known to have survived. Our exhibition brings together the largest group shown together since many were sold from the collections of the Marquesses of Lothian at Newbattle Abbey in the 1970s.

Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England, written more than a century after our portraits were painted, describes Jamesone as "the Vandyck of Scotland, to which title he had a double pretension, not only having surpassed his countrymen as a portrait-painter, but from his works being sometimes at tributed to Sir Antony, who was his fellow scholar; both having studied under Rubens at Antwerp [...] When King Charles visited Scotland in 1633, the magistrates of Edinburgh, knowing his majesty's taste, employed Jamesone to make drawings of the Scottish monarchs, with which the King was so much pleased, that inquiring for the painter, he sat to him and rewarded him with a diamond ring from his own finger."