John Pettie was a popular Scottish painter who mined the novels of Sir Walter Scott for his subjects, and pressed all of his friends and many casual visitors to his studio into service as unpaid models. In the 1870s, Pettie painted a series of ‘costume portraits’ wearing 17th- and 18th-century armour, of which, like many painters of history, he kept a collection in his studio. In this way he immortalised ES Kennedy, GH Boughton and Briton Riviere, Edmund Bechstein, Arthur Tooth, the novelist William Black, Rider Haggard, CW Cope and even his biographer Martin Hardie. Hardie wrote that Pettie’s ‘portraits are solid and real – live men and women with blood pulsing through their veins, with eyes brimming with intelligence. Here, as in his subject-pictures, he was always a colourist, and in some of his portraits the flesh-tints bloom like the colour on the petal of a flower. The momentariness of his conception, the vigour of his grip, the nobility of his chiaroscuro, again and again bring remembrance of the portraits of Rembrandt .... [they] were painted with wonderful rapidity of workmanship. Some of the finest examples of his mastery and swift ease of technique occupied a few hours only. Among them are many done for pure pleasure, showing that a painter does his best when he paints for himself. In Pettie’s self-chosen portraits there is a bravura and audacity which is often lacking in imposed commissions. Now and then, when he worked solely for the joy of working, he produced a portrait that had the power of an old master, something of the rich colour and forceful chiaroscuro of a Rembrandt, of the vigour and directness of a Hals.’