Dr. Nathaniel Spens, 1933

Henry Macbeth-Raeburn RA (1860 - 1947)

RA Collection: Art

This progress proof was shown as Henry Macbeth-Raeburn's Diploma Work in the RA Summer Exhibition of 1933 (cat. no. 1337; reprod. The Royal Academy illustrated, 1933, p. 5). Macbeth-Raeburn, who had been elected as an Associate Engraver in July 1922 and full Academician on 14 February 1933, was well-known for his mastery of mezzotint in the eighteenth-century manner, and particularly so for his prints after portraits by Henry Raeburn RA, examples of which he had regularly exhibited at the Academy since 1909. Raeburn's original painting of Dr Nathaniel Spens, a celebrated amateur archer, was commissioned in 1793 by the Royal Company of Archers (the Queen's Bodyguard for Scotland), in whose collection it remains.