Aberdeen is a city in North East Scotland. It is the third most populous city in Scotland, one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas and the United Kingdom's 39th most populous built-up area, with an official 2020 population estimate of 198,590 for the city of Aberdeen and 227,560 for the local council area. The city is 93 mi (150 km) northeast of Edinburgh and 398 mi (641 km) north of London, and is the northernmost major city in the United Kingdom. Aberdeen has a long, sandy coastline and features an oceanic climate, with cool summers and mild, rainy winters.
Rosa Bonheur was a French artist known best as a painter of animals (animalière). She also made sculpture in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.
The Scottish Colourists were a group of four painters, three from Edinburgh, whose Post-Impressionist work, though not universally recognised initially, came to have a formative influence on contemporary Scottish art and culture. They four artists, Francis Cadell, John Duncan Fergusson, Leslie Hunter and Samuel Peploe, were prolific painters spanning the turn of the twentieth century until the beginnings of World War II. While now banded as one group with a collective achievement and a common sense of British identity, it is a misnomer to believe their artwork or their painterly careers were heterogeneous.
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer was an English painter and sculptor, well known for his paintings of animals – particularly horses, dogs, and stags. However, his best-known works are the lion sculptures at the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square.
William Dyce was a Scottish painter, who played a part in the formation of public art education in the United Kingdom, and the South Kensington Schools system. Dyce was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and played a part in their early popularity.
John Duncan Fergusson was a Scottish artist and sculptor, regarded as one of the major artists of the Scottish Colourists school of painting.
Archibald Simpson was a Scottish architect, who along with his rival John Smith, is regarded as having fashioned the character of Aberdeen as "The Granite City".
James William Giles ARSA was a Scottish landscape painter. Several of his landscapes were commissioned and purchased by Queen Victoria and members of the Scottish aristocracy. He was a member of the Royal Scottish Academy.
Aberdeen Art Gallery is the main visual arts exhibition space in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland. It was founded in 1884, in a building designed by Alexander Marshall Mackenzie, with a sculpture court added in 1905. In 1900 it received the art collection of Alexander Macdonald, a local granite merchant. The gallery is noted for its fine collection of modern Scottish and international art, including works by Ken Currie, Gilbert & George, Ivor Abrahams, Bridget Riley and Bruce McLean.
James Cromar Watt was a Scottish artist, architect and jeweller.
The Society of Women Artists (SWA) is a British art body dedicated to celebrating and promoting fine art created by women. It was founded as the Society of Female Artists (SFA) in about 1855, offering women artists the opportunity to exhibit and sell their works. Annual exhibitions have been held in London since 1857, with some wartime interruptions.
Scottish art in the nineteenth century is the body of visual art made in Scotland, by Scots, or about Scottish subjects. This period saw the increasing professionalisation and organisation of art in Scotland. Major institutions founded in this period included the Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Scotland, the Royal Scottish Academy of Art, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Glasgow Institute. Art education in Edinburgh focused on the Trustees Drawing Academy of Edinburgh. Glasgow School of Art was founded in 1845 and Grays School of Art in Aberdeen in 1885.
Will Maclean MBE is a Scottish artist and professor of art. Born in Inverness in 1941, he was a midshipman on HMS Conway at Anglesey in Wales before attending Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen (1961–65) and then the British School at Rome (1966) as part of a year on a Scottish Education Department Travelling Scholarship. He was an art teacher in Fife schools and taught pupils at Bell Baxter High School in Cupar between 1969 and 1979.
Dorothy Johnstone (1892–1980) was a Scottish painter and watercolourist.
Margaret May Giles was a British painter, sculptor, and medallist. She was a member of the Society of Medallists and exhibited at their first exhibition in 1898 which was held at the Dutch Gallery in London, where her piece "Two Medals" was favorably critiqued.
Barbara Balmer RSA was a Scottish artist and teacher.
John Middleton was an English artist known for his accomplished watercolour paintings. He was the youngest and the last important member of the Norwich School of painters, which was the first provincial art movement in Britain. As well as being a talented etcher, he produced oil paintings and was an enthusiastic amateur photographer.
Marian Leven RSA is a Scottish artist known for her sculptures, land art and collage work and for painting in oils, acrylics and watercolour.
Robert Weir Allan (1851–1942) was a Scottish-born painter known mainly for his depiction of landscape and marine subjects. He was born in Glasgow into a family that encouraged and valued his natural artistic ability. He exhibited at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts when aged 22, and two years later he had a painting selected for the Royal Academy, in London. In 1875–80 he attended the Académie Julian in Paris, and he was influenced by the French school of rustic naturalism and also by French Impressionism. Working plein-air, he developed a loose, painterly approach to landscape subjects. He was a prolific artist who travelled widely in Europe, India, Japan, the Middle East and America; however, he drew particular inspiration from the north-east coast of Scotland – a subject to which he returned throughout his life. He exhibited extensively in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and became vice-president of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. He was equally at home with oil painting, and during his lifetime he had 84 paintings selected for exhibition at the Royal Academy. For the last 60 years of his life his home was in London, and he died there at the age of 90 in 1942.
