Scottish Painter, 1758-1840 was a Scottish portrait and landscape painter, often called the father of Scottish landscape painting". Edinburgh Castle and Nor'Loch, circa 1780.Born in Edinburgh, he studied at the Royal High School and the Trustees Academy under Alexander Runciman, and, having been apprenticed as an heraldic painter to a coachbuilder, he, at the age of sixteen, attracted the attention of Allan Ramsay, who took the youth with him to London, and employed him upon the subordinate portions of his works. Nasmyth returned to Edinburgh in 1778, and was soon largely patronized as a portrait painter. He also assisted Mr Miller of Dalswinton, as draughtsman, in his mechanical researches and experiments; and, this gentleman having generously offered the painter a loan to enable him to pursue his studies abroad, he left in 1782 for Italy, where he remained two years. Robert Burns, 1787.On his return he painted the excellent portrait of Robert Burns, now in the Scottish National Gallery, well known through Walker's engraving. Political feeling at that time ran high in Edinburgh, and Nasmyth's pronounced Liberal opinions, which he was too outspoken and sincere to disguise, gave offence to many of his aristocratic patrons, and led to the diminution of his practice as a portraitist. In his later years, accordingly, he devoted himself mainly to landscape work, and did not disdain on occasion to set his hand to scene-painting for the theatres. He has been styled, not unjustly, the father of Scottish landscape arte His subjects are carefully finished and coloured, but are wanting in boldness and freedom.  Related Paintings of Alexander Nasmyth :. | At the Isaakievskaya Square in Leningrad | A Highland Loch Landscape | A Highland Loch Landscape | The Family of Neil 3rd Earl of Rosebery in the grounds of Dalmeny House | A Leningrad Theme |
Related Artists:
James Seymour
British Painter , ca.1702-1752 English painter and draughtsman. The son of James Seymour (d 1739), a dealer in pictures and precious metals, Seymour was among the first English painters to specialize exclusively in sporting subject-matter. Though he possibly received some informal drawing instruction from the topographer Francis Place, Seymour was essentially a self-taught artist whose education was based on the study of pictures that passed through his father's hands; one of his earliest known works is a sketch of a horse's head after van Dyck (sold London, Christie's, 16 June 1970). His early 'genius to drawing of horses' was, according to George Vertue, compromised by 'modish extravagances' through living 'gay high and loosely' and because he 'never studied enough to paint or colour well'. Elsewhere, however, it was recorded that by 1739 he was 'reckoned the finest draughtsman in his way [of horses, hounds etc.] in the whole world' (Universal Spectator, 1739), and he was certainly preferred to his chief rival, John Wootton, by many sporting patrons. Among his employers was William Jolliffe MP, of Ammerdown. Though many of his paintings are either derivative of Wootton or simply inept, or both, others are characterized by a self-conscious stylistic naivety in which meticulous attention to detail and eerily static compositions combine to create curiously memorable images of some apparent sophistication.
BORGIANNI, Orazio
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1578-1616 Orazio Borgianni (c. 1575 - buried 15 January 1616) was an Italian painter and etcher of the Mannerist and early-baroque periods. He was the stepbrother of the sculptor and architect Giulio Lasso. Borgianni was born in Rome, where he was documented in February 1604. He was instructed in the art of painting by his brother, Giulio Borgiani, called Scalzo. The patronage by Philip II of Spain induced him to visit that Spain, where he signed an inventory in January 1605. He returned to Rome from Spain after April 1605 at the height of his career, and most of the work of his maturity was carried out 1605-16. In Spain, he signed a petition to begin an Italianate academy of painting and executed a series of nine paintings for the Convento de Portacoeli, Valladolid, where they remain. From his time in Spain, there remain two of his paintings in the Prado Museum: St Christopher and the Stigmatization of St Francis. On his return to Rome he was patronized by the Spanish ambassador, for whom he painted several pictures, and he was also employed in painting for the churches. He painted as late as 1630. after which he returned to Spain. He frescoed in the apse of the church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome, a Martyrdom of S.Stefano I and a Messengers of Constantine call on Saint Silvestro (1610). His canvas of San Carlo Borromeo in the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1612) is an eclectic and emotive synthesis of both Carracci and tenebrist styles. The influence of Caravaggio is also evident in a painting of the same saint (1616) now in the Hermitage Museum. A lively self-portrait of an earnest, somewhat foppish Borgianni is in the Rome Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica.
Gerhard Wilhelm von Reutern
painted Abraham sacrificing Isaac in 1849