Robert Burns

Robert Burns was born into a poor farming family in the south of Scotland in 1759. He was an avid reader and began composing poetry at the age of fifteen. He won fame for his first collection of poems in 1784 and went on to write more than six hundred poems and songs during his lifetime. His passionate views on liberty and equality made him a symbol of Scottish culture and national identity. This portrait was modeled more than forty years after Burns’s death in 1796 at the age of thirty-seven. It depicts the poet in the later years of his life, wearing a dress coat and cravat fashionable in eighteenth-century Edinburgh.