Joseph Farquharson R.A., R.S.A, (1846-1935)

'[His] extraordinary virtuosity has been developed by experience' wrote Walter Sickert (W. Sickert, A Free House, 1947, pp. 204-6) when describing the work of Joseph Farquharson, one of the most celebrated Scottish landscape painters of the 19th century.

His impressionistic technique owes much to time spent in Paris during the early 1880s, under the tutelage of Carolus Duran. Students were encouraged to visit the forest of Fontainebleau to practice painting en plein air. The instinct to immerse himself in his subject came naturally to Farquharson who possessed a number of mobile painting huts, furnished with stoves, with which he travelled around his estate at Finzean in Royal Deeside.