The Scottish National Gallery gets the greatest bargain ever when they purchased The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch by Henry Raeburn.

The National Gallery bought the painting in 1949 for £525 (about £16,000 today) from a lady in Bournemouth, who'd bought it for £700 twenty years earlier from the great-grand daughter of the skating Reverend Walker himself. Now, it’s the most popular painting in Scotland. Hidden from us for 150 years by the Walkers, the image has as hard of a time escaping Scotland as the Mona Lisa has in Italy, I mean...France.

Speaking of excessive national pride, this Scottish icon may not be so Scottish. First, Walker had an American mother, from Virginia no less. And he learned to skate as a boy in the Netherlands. Rotterdam to be precise. The relaxed yet disciplined stroke comes from learning the sport as boy on the Dutch canals.

Second, it's possible, even likely, that the painting is French. That's right, French. You'd think this was yet one more effort of the French to claim ownership over something cool. According to them, they invented the bicycle, movies, airplane, immunology, radiation, internet, and now the Skating Minister. This time it was the guys who buy and write about art for the Scottish National Gallery who began campaigning to remove the painting from its Scottish pedestal.

Those denouncers might just be right about this mystery. The style of the painting is a big break from Raeburn's other work and closer to that of Henri-Pierre Danloux (1753 – 1809). The Frenchman also painted the rich and famous, and unlike Raeburn preferred to capture movement. He popped up in Edinburgh after escaping the fate of his aristocratic patrons with the French Revolution. Recent X-rays have shown that the lead white paint Raeburn used in all 1,000 of his known portraits is absent in the Skating Minister.

What to do? Nothing apparently. The Reverend continues to be everywhere in Scotland and to embody Scottish art and creative genius. Whatever.