The very small collection of five paintings we have at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, are all portraits of astronomers/physicists/mathematicians from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were probably donated by former directors/astronomers with strong connections to the observatory. This is particularly true of the portrait we have of Lord Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford, who gifted his library to the nation in the late nineteenth century and the reason this observatory exists.