The Society is delighted to announce that through the generosity of the Hathorn family it has secured on long term loan a portrait of Vans Hathorn WS, the founding hero of the Society’s orphan school John Watson’s Institution.
The portrait was commissioned in December 1837 to honour Vans Hathorn, the long-serving treasurer of the school and by then well into his 80s, while there was still time. He’d been involved in the affairs of John Watson’s Trust since 1813, and it was his brilliance in the handling of the legacy in trust and his determined fight that it be used to help orphans that had enabled the school’s opening in 1828.
Treasurer of the Society Andrew Storie put the task in the hands of John Watson Gordon (later knighted), who was working at the same time on a separate commission from the Society, the portrait of Lord Hope that now dominates the Grand Stair. By January 1838, Hathorn’s portrait was described as “well underway” and by January 1839 the picture was finished and hanging in the school’s chapel. Hathorn lived to see it there, passing away nine months later.
The Hathorn portrait hanging in the chapel.
The painting remained in the chapel until the final closure of the school in 1975. The vast painting would have been threatened with homelessness had the Hathorn family not stepped in to take it under their care, and the picture was restored and reframed at their expense before being rehung in their London home. They were keen however that the picture would one day return to Edinburgh, and when the Society sent out an appeal in 2025 to learn of the painting’s whereabouts, they got in touch and offered to host a visit from Society researchers. From these first conversations came the offer of the picture coming to the Signet Library which will be its third home in 188 years.
The picture is a powerful visual symbol and representation of the WS Society’s charitable work and involvements, at a time when, with the Society itself now a registered charity, these have never been closer to the heart of its everyday life. The painting will hang alongside the Grand Stair, next to the Raeburn portrait of George Dallas, whose System of Stiles, written during the Carolingian Restoration period, launched three centuries of WS intellectual involvement in Scottish life and law.