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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. |
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