John Arbuthnott (1778–1860), 8th Viscount of Arbuthnott

David Wilkie painted John Arbuthnott, 8th Viscount of Arbuthnott around 1822–1826, during his established period as the leading Scottish portrait and genre painter of his generation. Wilkie had been appointed Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King in Scotland in 1823, and his aristocratic portrait commissions from this period reflect his new status. Arbuthnott, a Scottish peer from an ancient Kincardineshire family, required the kind of dignified but informal landed portrait that Wilkie was well positioned to provide, combining Scottish character with the London portrait tradition he had absorbed from Lawrence.

Wilkie places the sitter in a three-quarter composition with a landscape background — a formula derived from Reynolds and Lawrence — rendered in the warm, golden tonality characteristic of his oil portrait work. The face is painted with his characteristic attention to character over idealisation, the brushwork looser in the costume than in the precisely observed features.