John Robertson Reid was born in Edinburgh and attended the Royal Scottish Academy’s life class. As a painter of rural subjects, he went on to exert an influence over Arthur Melville’s early ‘kailyard’ style, and that of James Guthrie, who visiting Reid in London, soon abandoned narrative painting in favour of rustic subjects. His sister, Flora Macdonald Reid, also learnt from him. Much of his career was spent in London in the circle of fellow Scottish painters such as W.Q. Orchardson and Thomas Graham.

John Robertson Reid RBA ROI RI, 1851-1926

Born in Edinburgh, Reid attended the Royal Scottish Academy’s Life Class in the early 1870s. There he taught McTaggart, who was to exercise a lasting influence on his work. Although not one of the Glasgow Boys, Reid shared many of their ideals, particularly their interest in landscape painting en plein air and the Realist movement, influenced by the work of the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. Reid moved to Sussex and then to London, settling in Hampstead in 1879. In London he met the Glasgow Boy James Guthrie and the painter George Clausen, a neighbour in Hampstead.