Art print featuring artwork of Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth, part of the National Galleries of Scotland Collection.
Printed onto museum Fine Art paper 280gsm, a gently textured etching paper particularly suited to giclee reproductions of artworks and paintings, ideal for premium colour and monochrome print.
This half-length portrait of Burns, framed within an oval, has become the most well-known and widely reproduced image of the famous Scottish poet. Nasmyth's painting, commissioned by the publisher William Creech, was to be engraved for a new edition of Burns' poems. He is shown fashionably dressed against a landscape, evoking his rural background in Alloway, Ayrshire.
Burns and Nasmyth had become good friends, having been introduced to one another in Edinburgh by a mutual patron, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton. Nasmyth, pleased to have recorded Burns' likeness convincingly, decided to leave the painting in a slightly unfinished state.
Alexander Nasmyth (9 September 1758 – 10 April 1840) was a Scottish portrait and landscape painter, a pupil of Allan Ramsay.
