Alexander Nasmith

The painter that David Wilkie referred to as "the founder of the landscape painting school of Scotland" died on April 10, 1840.  Alexander Nasmith began his career as an artist through apprenticing for house decorator James Cummyng, and later under portraitist Allan Ramsey. Nasmith later trained other painters, including John Thomson and possibly John Ruskin's father.



Nasmith enjoyed a fair amount of success as a portrait painter.  The Scottish National Gallery owns eight Nasmith paintings, two of which are portraits of his friend Robert Burns.  But is was more for his skill in landscape painting that Walter Scott commissioned Nasmith to provide vignette engravings for the 1821 edition of the Waverley Novels.  Nasmith contributed more than 60 illustrations to Scott's works.

John Thomson

"...Visited the Exhibition on my way home from the Court. The new rooms are most splendid, and several good pictures. The Institution has subsisted but five years, and it is astonishing how much superior the worst of the present collection are to the teaboard-looking things which first appeared. John Thomson, of Duddingston, has far the finest picture in the Exhibition, of a large size—subject Dunluce, a ruinous castle of the Antrim family, near the Giant's Causeway, with one of those terrible seas and skies which only Thomson can paint..."
From Scott's Journal for February 9, 1826

John Thomson was born about seven years after Walter Scott.  He was born to a minister, and followed in his father's footsteps, becoming minister of Duddingston Kirk, near Edinburgh.  From an early age, he showed a proclivity for painting landscapes, such as Walter Scott appreciated.  Many of these were the Ayrshire landscapes he grew up with.

Scott and Thomson probably met around 1793 when Thomson enrolled at Edinburgh University.  Many years later (around 1826), Thomson collaborated with Joseph Turner producing engravings for Scott's "Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland".