Stanley Cursiter was a prolific twentieth-century Scottish painter who specialised in landscapes, portraits. Cubism, futurism, and vorticism inspired his early paintings. He created landscapes in watercolours in East Lothian, Orkney, and Shetland.

Stanley Cursiter CBE RSA RSW HON LLD, 1887-1976

Born in Kirkwall, Orkney, Cursiter moved to Edinburgh to follow a career in architecture. After serving an apprenticeship as a chromolithographic designer he was admitted to Edinburgh College of Art. He was a keen follower of Post-Impressionism and the Futurist works shown in London in 1912, and on his election to the Society of Scottish Artists he arranged for a part of the exhibition to be shown in Edinburgh the following year, thereby introducing the Scottish public to the works of Cézanne, Gaugin, Matisse and Van Gogh.
Cursiter became a pioneering and visionary gallery curator and administrator after his appointment in 1925 as Keeper at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Later he was a Director of the National Galleries of Scotland and, from 1948, a full-time painter in his native Orkney.