The founder of the WS Society’s school for orphans, Vans Hathorn WS, has joined novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott, pioneering legal lawyer George Dallas WS and philanthropist and connoisseur Sir James Gibson Craig on a very significant wall of the Signet Library this week.
The installation of Vans Hathorn’s vast portrait, placed in our care on loan by the Hathorn family, next to the Grand Stair at the Signet Library, completes a fine sequence of portraits chosen to represent the importance of the Society to charitable life and giving, the arts and the finest ambitions of the law in Scotland itself.
All four portraits stand together against the place where the Signet Library joins with Edinburgh’s ancient Parliament Hall, underneath the foundational yearstone with its famous “1636” inscription. The whole Society sends its thanks and gratitude to the Hathorn family whose gesture in allowing the loan has made this possible.