The Skating Minister

In the general spirit of re-framing what can, for many of us, seem a rather dreary time of year, I thought it would be rather nice to celebrate some Making Light icons: that is, people, creative acts, or works of art that, in one way or another, embody the essential lightness of winter, rather than its gloom or melancholy. So without further ado, let me introduce our first Making Light icon: The Skating Minister.

Many of you will know the Skating Minister as a national icon rather than, perhaps, a seasonal one, for he is to Scotland very much as The Mona Lisa is to France, Hokusai’s Great Wave is to Japan, or Vermeer’s The Girl with the Pearl Earring is to the Netherlands. If you pay a visit to the National Gallery in Edinburgh, you’ll not only find the portrait of the Skating Minister himself, but a thousand reproductions, all zipping blithely across tea towels and fridge magnets, notebooks and tote bags. The Reverend Robert Walker has become a massively popular figure who has somehow become suggestive of the Scottishness of Scottish art (despite a now-discredited attempt, twenty years ago, to attribute the painting to a French artist). I’ll try to get at the reason for his popularity later, but first, who is The Skating Minister and what is he doing, dashing across Duddingston Loch on a cold winter’s day in the mid 1790s?

The Reverend Robert Walker was born in Ayrshire, but spent much of his childhood in the Netherlands, where his father was a Presbyterian minister at the Scottish Kirk in Rotterdam.

Eighteenth-century Europe was much colder than it is today (due to what’s referred to as the Little Ice Age) and the canals around Walker’s childhood home would have routinely frozen over during the winter months. While ice skating or sliding (on bone skates) had been practiced all around Europe for centuries, the Dutch developed modern narrow metal skates, and pioneered the art of “rolling”: travelling along the ice in graceful curves, using the blade’s outer edge.

During his childhood in the Netherlands, Robert Walker must have learned to skate very well indeed in the Dutch fashion. He brought his excellent winter skills back to Scotland, when he returned home to become a minister like his father, first at Crammond, and later at the famous kirk on Edinburgh’s Canongate. His parishioners included eminent enlightenment figures, like Adam Smith.

Eighteenth-century Edinburgh was a hub of not only of political philosophy, but of sport and conviviality. The city abounded with countless clubs and societies, including the first ice skating club in Britain, which was founded in the 1740s. Robert Walker was a prominent member.

When Duddingston Loch froze over, Walker and his Edinburgh pals would meet up for a day’s jolly skating, whirling about on the ice, alone or in groups, displaying their prowess by striking attitudes such as the Flying Mercury (which appeared on the Society’s medals)

. . . or the “Dutch roll”

This rolling “attitude” is one in which countless male skaters are depicted in eighteenth-century prints and drawings and to a viewer of that time, this position would have been immediately suggestive of masculine skating skill and competence (without, perhaps, the “Mercury’s” all too obviously flamboyant showmanship).

It’s no surprise, then that it is in this “rolling” position that Walker’s good friend and executor, Henry Raeburn, decided to depict him in action on Duddingston Loch. Floating noiselessly across the ice, arms folded before, leg outstretched behind, The Reverend Walker’s the embodiment of winter grace, a figure completely at ease with himself and the frozen landscape that surrounds him.

But with all his masculine grace and ease, the Skating Minister is undeniably a figure of fun as well. This is certainly the reason why he’s so popular with contemporary audiences, who enjoy how this figure in sober Presbyterian black finds, in the frozen greys of a Scottish winter, an opportunity to let himself go a little. But I also think that eighteenth-century viewers – including the artist and indeed the subject himself – would have been as delighted and amused by the portrait as we seem to be today.

In his portrait of his friend, Raeburn has somehow captured the essential wit and animation that’s so familiar in other contemporary representations of the esteemed inhabitants of eighteenth-century Edinburgh.

To me, Raeburn’s portrait has always immediately called to mind the gently satiric prints of his Edinburgh artistic contemporary, John Kay. And I think that his painting of the Reverend Robert Walker might also be usefully set alongside the work of other eighteenth-century graphic artists as well: for Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank, and many other satirists, there were few things funnier in winter than the spectacle of men upon the ice.

For an eighteenth-century viewer, any elegant man upon the on ice was a figure just waiting to transform himself into an inelegant man upon his arse.

Behind each confident display of masculine agility in these eighteenth-century wintertime scenes then, there’s always a hilarious accident just waiting to happen.

And isn’t that part of the fun of winter? The permission that is granted to all adults by an altered landscape to return to childish fun? You step out confidently upon the ice, but your friend is waiting there, with a snowball, ready to knock you over.

So I think that what everyone (back in the eighteenth-century or today) loves so about the Reverend Robert Walker is that he’s someone who just doesn’t care. Of what matter to him is the inevitable fall? The snowball? The crack in the ice? The prospect of being transformed from a figure of elegance into a figure of fun and ridicule? Who cares! The Reverend Robert Walker is intent upon his wintery enjoyment and glides lightly on toward the framing edges of his portrait in optimistic perpetuity.

And so, to me, The Reverend Robert Walker is a quintessential figure of winter lightness and lightheartedness. His cheery, forward motion is what we all need a wee bit of every January, and I think he makes a very fitting icon for what we are trying to celebrate this year in Making Light

But what of women on ice, you ask? Well, I might say more about them tomorrow.