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Kenneth Sutherland, 3rd Lord Duffus, by Richard Waitt, c.1712.
Kenneth Sutherland, 3rd Lord Duffus, d. 1734. Jacobite about 1712
Caption
Lord Duffus was a Scottish aristocrat who supported the Act of Union in 1707. However, during the 1715 Jacobite Rising he joined the rebels who wanted to restore the exiled Stuart dynasty. The Rising failed and Duffus’s estates were forfeited. He fled to the continent, but was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Released in 1717, he later served in the Russian Imperial Navy where he rose to the rank of admiral. This portrait was painted before Lord Duffus joined the Jacobite cause. The painting is an early and complete depiction of Highland dress. Lord Duffus is shown dressed for hunting and the image conforms to the traditional Gaelic ideal of the aristocrat as ‘the hunter of deer’.
Acc. No. PG 1095
Medium Oil on canvas
Size 203.20 x 140.60 cm (222.50 x 159.50 x 10.50 cm)
Artist Biography
Richard Waitt (Scottish, active 1708 - died 1733)
Waitt specialised in portraiture, but began his career as a decorative painter. His first recorded work is a coat of arms for the Earl of Hopetoun. He may have trained in the Edinburgh studio of the painter John Scougal and seems to have produced several different types of painting, notably still life. He married into a family with Jacobite sympathies and possibly left the country, temporarily, after the 1715 Jacobite Rising. He must have returned by 1722, however, when he resumed work for the Clan Grant based in Castle Grant, Strathspey. Waitt's series of portraits formed a unique clan gallery.
National Galleries