Kenneth Sutherland, Lord Duffus

Richard Waitt was a Scottish portrait painter active in the early decades of the 18th century, celebrated today primarily for his systematic records of Highland clan culture at a critical moment in Scottish history. Kenneth Sutherland, Lord Duffus was painted in the years following the 1707 Acts of Union, when Highland identity and Jacobite loyalty were charged political statements. Sutherland, a committed Jacobite, participated in the 1715 rising; his forfeited estates and subsequent exile make this portrait a document not merely of a man but of a cause. Waitt worked extensively for clan Grant and other Highland families, producing a body of work that today constitutes an irreplaceable visual record of tartan and Highland material culture before the post-1745 suppression. His approach belongs to the tradition of British Baroque portraiture as filtered through a Scottish provincial lens: direct, dignified, and keenly observant of costume detail, with none of the continental flourish of Kneller or Lely. The painting is held in the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, where it is recognised as one of the finest survivals of early Highland identity portraiture.