James Irvine (1822 – 17 March 1889) was a Scottish

portraitist A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expressions are predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this re ...

Life

Irvine was born in

Menmuir Menmuir is a parish in the county of Angus in Scotland. Kirkton of Menmuir consists of only three houses (the Old Schoolhouse, the Manse, the Old Inn) and for this reason is referred to locally as "twa hooses and another yin," but around 250 pe ...

Forfarshire Angus ( sco, Angus; gd, Aonghas) is one of the 32 local government council areas of Scotland, a registration county and a lieutenancy area. The council area borders Aberdeenshire, Dundee City and Perth and Kinross. Main industries include agri ...

in 1822. He was the eldest son of John Irvine and was educated at the local parish school. He was a pupil of the Scottish portrait painter

Colvin Smith Colvin Smith RSA (1795 – 21 July 1875) was a Scottish portraitist. Life Smith was born at Brechin, in Angus, the son of John Smith, a merchant, and his wife, Cecilia Gillies. He studied art in London at the Royal Academy Schools and worked ...

Brechin Brechin (; gd, Breichin) is a city and former Royal burgh in Angus, Scotland. Traditionally Brechin was described as a city because of its cathedral and its status as the seat of a pre-Reformation Roman Catholic diocese (which continues today ...

Louis Black Scottish ex slave by James Irvine

Irvine was able to gain paid experience by painting the "old retainers" on Mr. Carnegy-Arbuthnott of Balnamoon estate. Irvine was based as a painter at Arbroath, before he moved to Montrose where he gathered commissions from the rectors of the

Montrose Academy Montrose Academy is a coeducational secondary school in Montrose Angus. The School now teaches people from ages 11–18. It became a comprehensive school in the mid-fifties and was one of a pair of Scottish schools which formed a country-wide t ...

and the curator of Montrose Museum.L. H. Cust, ‘Irvine, James (1822–1889)’, rev. Jennifer Melville, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 200
accessed 11 Sept 2013
/ref> Eventually he received much more work as he was recognised as Scotland's leading portraitist. He was a good friend of his fellow artist

George Paul Chalmers George Paul Chalmers (1833 – 20 February 1878) was a Scottish landscape, marine, interior and portrait painter. Life Chalmers was born at Montrose, the son of a captain of a coastal vessel, and at the age of twenty he started to study ...

. Among his portraits were those of James Coull (1786–1880), a survivor of the sea battle that led to the

Capture of USS Chesapeake The capture of USS ''Chesapeake'', also known as the Battle of Boston Harbor, was fought on 1 June 1813, between the Royal Navy frigate and the United States Navy frigate , as part of the War of 1812 between the United States and the United Ki ...

. Coull had also been born in

Ferryden Ferryden is a village in Angus, Scotland Angus ( sco, Angus; gd, Aonghas) is one of the 32 local government council areas of Scotland, a registration county and a lieutenancy area. The council area borders Aberdeenshire, Dundee City and ...

, near Montrose but decades before Irvine in 1786. Coull had fought at the

Battle of Trafalgar The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a naval engagement between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies during the War of the Third Coalition (August–December 1805) of the Napoleonic Wars (180 ...

and had lost a hand to a musket ball. After years of whaling he had retired to his hometown where Irvine painted him five times. Coull had become a celebrity because of his life and for living so long. Coull's obituary was eventually covered in the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

''.Old Sea Dog points to the future of the NPG
national galleries, accessed September 2013 Irvine also painted some landscapes and he had begun memorial portraits of the Earl and Countess of Dalhousie when he died of congestion of the lungs at his home in Montrose on the 17 March 1889. Irvine has over thirty paintings in public ownership

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Irvine, James 1822 births 1889 deaths People from Forfar 19th-century Scottish painters Scottish male painters 19th-century Scottish male artists