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 :. | River Forth | At the Isaakievskaya Square in Leningrad | The Family of Neil 3rd Earl of Rosebery in the grounds of Dalmeny House | A Highland Loch Landscape | Castle Huntly. |
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Johann Michael Rottmayr
Austrian,1654-1730 Austrian painter and draughtsman. He is most notable for large-scale religious and secular decorative schemes, and his career heralded the important 18th-century German contribution to late Baroque and Rococo fresco painting. He was probably taught by his mother, who was a painter of wooden sculpture. Between 1675 and 1687-8 he was in Venice as a pupil and assistant of the Munich artist Johann Carl Loth, whose studio attracted many painters from Austria and southern Germany. It is possible that Rottmayr also visited other Italian cities, in particular Bologna and Rome. He returned to Salzburg in the late 1680s a mature painter and immediately received commissions for panels and frescoes. In 1689 he painted mythological scenes for the Karabinierisaal at the Residenz in Salzburg (in situ); in composition and style these are close to high Baroque models, particularly the work of Pietro da Cortona and Peter Paul Rubens. Such models, as well as the example of Loth, and Venetian painting, had an important influence on Rottmayr's panel paintings of this period, for example the Sacrifice of Iphigenia (c. 1691; Vienna, Belvedere) or St Agnes (1693-5) and St Sebastian (1694; both Passau, Cathedral). In these, the solidity of the figures is emphasized through the use of intense colours. For Rottmayr, however, the rational development of the figures and the composition was less important than the overall effect achieved by the use of colour. Incorrect details of anatomy and perspective found compensation in greater expressiveness, mainly conveyed by gesture and pose. Rottmayr's images are filled with plastic elements, creating a staccato effect. Several very important early commissions paved the way for Rottmayr's move to Vienna in the late 1690s.
skagen museum

Robert Talbot Kelly
(1861 - 1934) was an English orientalist landscape and genre painter, author and illustrator. Kelly was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, the son of Irish landscape artist Robert George Kelly. He left school in 1876 to take up work in a firm of cotton traders, but was also taught art by his father, exhibiting under the name R. G. Kelly Jnr. In the early 1880s, inspired by the places he saw while on vacation on an ocean cruise ship, Talbot-Kelly decided to take up his father's profession. He left his employment in 1882, travelled by boat to North Africa, and settled in Egypt in 1883, acquiring a studio in Cairo and becoming fluent in Arabic. He travelled throughout the country, writing about and painting the people and scenes he encountered both in towns and in the desert. He spent a considerable time with the Bedouin tribes who he described and illustrated in his 1902 book, "Egypt painted and described" (A & C Black). As his name became known he also earned an income from private commissions. He stayed in Egypt until 1915 when for reasons of health and age he returned to London - though he continued to paint constantly. An Arab cafe in Cairo (from "Egypt painted and described", 1902)"Egypt painted and described", his first illustrated travel book, was published in 1902 (by A & C Black), and was an account of his impressions and experiences of that country during his long stay there; an exhibition of his Egyptian views was also held at the Fine Art Society in the same year. His paintings and writing showed a great empathy and respect for local people and culture, especially that of the desert Bedouin Arabs.