Isabella Burns, Mrs John Begg, youngest sister of Robert Burns - By David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Isabella Burns Begg was the youngest sister of the poet, Robert Burns. She had a hard life, was widowed young and left with the rearing of nine children. She kept her family by setting up a village school. Hill was a great admirer of Burns and had published a large set of landscape paintings as The Land of Burns. Hill was familiar with the painted portrait of Burns and would have been much struck with the resemblance between the poet and his sister. Robert Burns died before photography was established but here, through this strongly expressed portrait of a woman, we can, astonishingly, grasp an idea of how the man might have looked in old age. In later years, she was allowed a picturesque cottage where she lived almost as a monument to her brother, entertaining 'hundreds upon hundreds from every corner of the United Kingdom and from the Continent and America'. Her obituary remarks: 'Hers was the natural manner which art cannot communicate and which is beyond convention'.

Collection

National Gallery of Scotland - Phase II

Inventory Number

4502361

Title

Isabella Burns, Mrs John Begg, youngest sister of Robert Burns - By David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Object Type

PhysicalObject

Measurements

- 19.80 x 13.80 cm