Over the course of this week the Signet Library has provided the backdrop to a new project by the celebrated Dutch art historian and photographer, Dr Carla van de Puttelaar. 

Dr van de Puttelaar is a regular visitor to the Signet Library, having researched the early David Scougall paintings which hang in the Commissioners’ Room for her book on 17th century Scottish Portraiture in 2022.  Her new project, supported by Museums & Galleries Edinburgh, is an exhibition on Scottish portraiture in the legal profession, past and present. Featuring around 40 artworks, the show will include a small group of 17th and 18th century oil paintings of lawyers and judges in Scotland by leading portraitists of the era, including Scougall, John Baptiste de Medina, as well as Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn. The law was an entirely male dominated occupation at that time, and to bring the exhibition up to the present, displayed alongside these artworks will be contemporary photographs of women working in the profession in Scotland today. The exhibition will amplify the advances that have taken place over the centuries, which now enable women to fill positions in the highest echelons of the legal profession. Many Writers to the Signet have been invited to the Signet Library this week to participate. We look forward to seeing their portraits when the exhibition opens at the City Art Centre in late 2025.