Ramsay, Hume and British Portraiture

Abstract

Through his career as a portraitist, Allan Ramsay drew academic life studies, Roman ruins, positional sketches of figures, self-portraits and portraits of his immediate family. The largest group of surviving drawings, however, consists of studies of hands. Ramsay typically drew these in red crayon on brown paper at roughly half the actual size, building up his sketches using fine lines, starting from the outside and moving inwards (following the hand’s anatomy). He indicates the hand’s form by using red shading and white highlighting, showing the wrinkling of skin around the knuckles, the different shape in contraction and flexion, the curves of muscular eminences, the protrusion of radial bones at the wrist and the distinctive lines of extensor tendons and veins running across the back. He adds further shading to indicate the source and strength of their illumination, sometimes adding a fleck of white crayon on a nail to suggest reflected light. Most of these drawings are preliminary studies for the sitters’ gestures in portraits. The hands perform a range of tasks: they sew, rest on a table ledge, finger the fretboard of a lute, hitch a fold in a garment, toy with a bracelet, or delicately hold a stave between index and forefinger (Figure 3.1).