Such indeed is the magic of the image that the Catalan architect Enric Miralles transposed the abstract dynamics of the figure into the shape of the west-facing windows in Scot-land’s new Parliament building. This is the story of a protagonist and how he found his way into my imagination. He had once studied to become a minister of the church. The previous minister had left because he had lost faith in the idea of an established church and the lay patron had failed for a number of years to supply the “elements mony”, needed to pay for the wine and bread of the sacrament.

Although the hazy background is brushed with the easy freedom we have come to expect from Raeburn, the lower part of the picture shows that fine skill in portraying the minutest details that Raeburn always retained. This early introduction to the sport and its necessary skills no doubt gave him an edge over his contemporaries in Scotland when he came to join the Edinburgh Skating Society. In 1949, art galleries had a faintly forbidding air, a certain aloofness, and did not go out of their way to publicise their activities. Although Raeburn generally believed that landscape backgrounds should not be too detailed, in this case he has been at pains to convey the feeling of an actual locality.

At the age of only twenty-one he was being asked to cope with a parish in disarray. The chairman of Christie’s at the time believed the painting would be “cheap at £1,000”. Long hidden in the houses of the subject’s descendants over four generations, this was its first, scarcely noticed, emergence from obscurity – to which it soon returned. As he rode into the city in these years Robert would have been struck, especially in bright weather, by the sight of the golden buildings of the classical New Town that was rising in the fields to the north of the Castle. Right after that meeting, I walked with Mike across the park to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see an exhibition I’d read about and was really keen to see. As we walked into the foyer, I went cold, on the hottest November day in Sydney for twenty years. Many of them had been described by an artillery officer, Robert Jones, in the first text book on skating, the grandly titled Treatise on Skating, published in 1772. Such indeed is the magic of the image that the Catalan architect Enric Miralles transposed the abstract dynamics of the figure into the shape of the west-facing windows in Scot-land’s new Parliament building. That they were friends we assume from Robert Walker’s will, but the clearest testimony of all is the painting itself. It is, however, the finely modulated, dark outline of Robert Walker’s figure against the icy greys of the foreground and the slight pink of the landscape and the gathering dark of the clouds in the distance, that are so striking and memorable about the portrait. Robert, however, skates alone. On a visit to the National Gallery of Scotland, in Edinburgh, I was blown away by the amazing collection but there was one portrait that I didn’t want to walk away from. It is more than likely that they at least walked round the looming Arthur’s Seat together to the frozen Duddingston Loch. Writers work in so many different ways and what works for one doesn’t work for another. The Reverend Robert Walker, skating on Duddingston Loch, had followed me from Scotland to Australia and I stood in front of him once again and stared even more closely. This development would take another two or three decades to complete, and in the meantime the focus of public affairs still lay in the medieval area of the city, despite its increasing overcrowding and squalor. Winter is freedom in Henry Raeburn’s portrait of a minister in black hat, coat and stockings skating on Duddingston Loch in about 1795. When Robert Walker died in 1808, at the age of fifty-three, the painting came into the possession of his widow, Jean Fraser.

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