This stunning portrait calls to mind the figure of a beautiful young girl from Robert Herdman’s major commission from The Royal Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland, After the Battle: A Scene in Covenanting Times, now hung in the National Gallery of Scotland. In this monumental work, Herdman captures the passion and concern for the injured soldier in each of the figures’ faces through intimate life studies. These are each skilfully integrated into a cohesive epic scene, which captures the plight of the lowly soldier on a heroic scale. One ‘Art In Scotland’ article explains how the artist was particularly happy in his smaller pictures, many of which, consisting of single figures {which are} very remarkable for refinement and delicacy of form and colour. This certainly shines through in this Portrait of a Girl with its fresh, fluent brushwork and rich colouring.
Herdman had a reputation as one of the most acclaimed portrait painters in Scotland, exhibiting portraiture regularly at the Royal Scottish and Royal Academy exhibitions. Somewhat sketchily painted, they were characterised by qualities of grace and refinement of form and beauty of colour. His obituary in the 'Scottish Leader' stated: "his brush-work was always suave and apparently effortless, which gave the spectator a sense of his never being worried or flurried, but always at his ease....Ultimately the great charm of Mr Herdman's work was the realisation of his natural and inborn sense of the beautiful..” A student of Robert Scott Lauder at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, Robert Herdman was lead by his teacher’s admiration for the rich colour of Venetian painting and he made several trips to Italy to study the Italian masters (although always returning to live back in Edinburgh). He first exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1850 and was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1863.

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