On 25 January, in Ayrshire and Auckland and Calgary and Dunedin, somebody will stand up, address a haggis and read the same eight verses. No other national poet gets this. There is no Yeats Night, no Whitman Night. Burns Night is observed in more countries than most people have visited.
And the face on the programme — the one on the shortbread tin, the banknote, the statue in Central Park — comes from a single small canvas painted in Edinburgh in 1787 and left deliberately unfinished.
Nasmyth's portrait
Alexander Nasmyth met Burns in Edinburgh in the winter of 1786–87, when the poet had come to the city from Ayrshire and become, briefly and violently, the most fashionable man in Scotland. They became friends. They went walking together in the Pentlands.
The portrait was commissioned by the publisher William Creech to be engraved as the frontispiece of the Edinburgh edition of Burns's poems. It is small — smaller than a sheet of A3 — and Nasmyth stopped work on it before it was finished. The usual account is that he was afraid of losing the likeness by carrying on.
Whether or not that is exactly true, the effect is real. The head is fully realised and the rest fades. What you get is a face and nothing else to look at, which is precisely why it reproduced so well and why it became the standard image.
The only likeness that matters
Burns sat for others. Alexander Reid painted a miniature the poet himself preferred. Peter Taylor did a portrait. Skirving made a chalk drawing after Nasmyth.
None of them stuck. Nasmyth's is the one that got engraved, and engraving is how images travelled in 1787. It went into the book, the book went everywhere, and within a generation the Nasmyth head was Burns in the same way that a particular Holbein is Henry VIII.
It hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.
Nasmyth was not really a portraitist
He had trained under Allan Ramsay in London and started as a portrait painter, but his politics were radical enough to cost him commissions among Edinburgh's conservative patrons, and he moved into landscape.
That turned out well. Nasmyth effectively invented the modern picture of Edinburgh — the castle from the west, the New Town going up, Princes Street with the Royal Institution under construction on the newly made Mound. He was also an engineer and a designer who worked on bridges and stage sets, and it shows: his townscapes are constructed rather than sketched.
The Burns portrait is an outlier in his catalogue. It is also the only picture of his that everybody has seen.
Tam o' Shanter
The other Burns that painters kept returning to is the poem. Tam o' Shanter, written in 1790, is a drunk farmer's ride home from Ayr, a witches' dance in the ruins of Alloway kirk, and a pursuit to the Brig o' Doon that costs his mare her tail.
It is a gift to a painter: a specific place, a named horse, a moment of visual panic. Nineteenth-century Scottish artists worked it repeatedly — John Faed in particular — and Delacroix, of all people, painted it in 1825.
The poem also does something few narrative poems manage. It spends its opening lines on the pleasure of sitting in a warm pub while the weather worsens outside, and it means it. The moral at the end is a joke.
For Burns Night
If you are hanging one thing for 25 January, hang the Nasmyth. It is the face everybody knows, it is small enough for a hall or a study, and it carries the whole thing without explanation.
At 20 × 25 cm it sits comfortably beside a bookcase. At 40 × 50 cm framed in black it becomes the thing people look at when they come through the door in January.
See the Robert Burns collection — archival prints, framed or unframed, made to order and shipped free worldwide.