Raeburn's Lost Portrait of Burns Rediscovered: the Reinvention of a National Icon

Commissioned by William Creech in 1787 for the Edinburgh edition of the Poems, Alexander Nasmyth's half-length oil portrait of Burns has been a Scottish national icon from 1872 and has since been appropriated internationally for commercial, cultural, social and even political purposes. In 1803 the London publishers Cadell & Davies, advised by the poet's friend Alexander Cunningham, asked Henry Raeburn to refresh Nasmyth's image for a frontispiece. Not engraved until 1820, the new portrait then vanished during the dispersal of the company archives. The re-emergence of the Cadell/Raeburn correspondence in 1889 stimulated decades of conflicted speculation and an abortive quest for the missing picture – prior to its sensational re-discovery at a London auction in 2025.