Alexander
Nasmyth
1758-1840
Alexander
Nasmyth was born in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh, the son of a
successful builder. He was an enormously energetic and widely
talented man. He began his artistic life under Allan Ramsay,
as a portraitist and was also a gifted engineer, designing paddle
steamers, the "bow and string" bridge and a host of
other projects. He was also involved in landscape garden design
and became a widely respected and influential teacher later
in his life. But undoubtedly it is his work as a landscape painter,
and specifically a Scottish landscape painter, that has been
of most lasting importance.
Indeed,
Sir David Wilkie hailed him as the founder of Scottish landscape
painting. Formerly in Scotland, landscape painting had been
almost solely decorative, the background for the real subject
of the picture or even simply as glorified wallpaper. Nasmyth
along with his near contemporary Jacob More (1740-1798), began
to see the full expressive potential of landscape painting and
the possibility which it offered to articulate the link between
a nation's history and culture and its countryside.
These
ideas were developed more fully by later "romantic"
landscape painters such as Horatio McCulloch but Nasmyth and
More were the first Scots to make the artistic leap. However
there undoubtedly remained a very strong decorative element
in much of Nasmyth's work with its careful patterning of nature
to fit the compositional conventions of Italian Seicento landscape
theory. But he was also a life-long champion, both as teacher
and practitioner, of the importance of close observation and
working outside, directly from nature.
It
was Nasmyth's gift that he seemed able to combine the two elements,
the decorative and the expressive, to create pictures which
were both accurate depictions of a location - true to the spirit
and the look of the place - and which still obeyed the aesthetic
rules.
Back
to Scottish Painters
