William Quiller Orchardson. Sir William Quiller Orchardson was a noted Scottish portraitist and painter of domestic and historical subjects who was knighted in June 1907, at the age of 75. Orchardson was born in Edinburgh, where his father was engaged in business.
Orchardson is a variation of Urquhartson, the name of a Highland sept settled on Loch Ness, from which the painter is descended. At the age of fifteen, Orchardson was sent to Edinburgh's renowned art school, the Trustees' Academy, then under the mastership of Robert Scott Lauder, where he had as fellow-students most of those who afterwards shed lustre on the Scottish school of the second half of the 19th century.
As a student, he was not especially precocious or industrious, but his work was distinguished by a peculiar reserve and an unusual determination that his hand should be subdued to his eye, with the result that his early works reach their own ideal as surely as those of his maturity. By the time he was twenty, Orchardson had mastered the essentials of his art, and had produced at least one picture which might be accepted as representative, a portrait of sculptor John Hutchison.
For the seven subsequent years he worked in Edinburgh, some of his attention being given to a black and white style, his practice in which having been partly acquired at a sketch club, which, in addition to Hutchison, included among its members Hugh Cameron, Peter
Orchardson is a variation of Urquhartson, the name of a Highland sept settled on Loch Ness, from which the painter is descended. At the age of fifteen, Orchardson was sent to Edinburgh's renowned art school, the Trustees' Academy, then under the mastership of Robert Scott Lauder, where he had as fellow-students most of those who afterwards shed lustre on the Scottish school of the second half of the 19th century.
As a student, he was not especially precocious or industrious, but his work was distinguished by a peculiar reserve and an unusual determination that his hand should be subdued to his eye, with the result that his early works reach their own ideal as surely as those of his maturity. By the time he was twenty, Orchardson had mastered the essentials of his art, and had produced at least one picture which might be accepted as representative, a portrait of sculptor John Hutchison.
For the seven subsequent years he worked in Edinburgh, some of his attention being given to a black and white style, his practice in which having been partly acquired at a sketch club, which, in addition to Hutchison, included among its members Hugh Cameron, Peter
Wikipedia ...