The Fleming Collection acquires 19th century landscape painting by Charlotte Nasmyth

28.07.2025

Charlotte Nasmyth, ‘Landscape with Figure on a Country Road, a Village beyond’, (1855). The Fleming Collection.

The accomplished landscape painting by Charlotte Nasmyth (1804-1884) recently purchased by the Fleming Collection is intriguing for a number of reasons: That it is a painting by a woman artist from 1855 suggests the presence of an untold story. Delve deeper, however, and you discover that story is just the tip of a rather remarkable iceberg.

Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840) is recognised as the father of Scottish landscape painting, pioneering the genre which would strike gold in the Victorian era. What is less well known is that he was the father of 11 children, eight of whom became painters, and that six of the eight were women.

Peter Johnson and Ernle Money, in their book The Nasmyth Family of Painters (1977), have this to say about Charlotte Nasmyth: “The youngest but by no means the least able of the Nasmyth daughters... a comparatively prolific painter... good at giving a general atmospheric effect.” This last point is well supported by ‘Landscape with a Figure on a Country Road, a village beyond’, which has just entered the Fleming Collection. But she is only one of a talented group of siblings.

Alexander Nasmyth married Barbara Foulis in 1786, and they began their life together in the three-gabled house on the south side of Edinburgh’s Grassmarket built by Nasmyth’s great-grandfather. A landed family who had lost their estates after siding with the Covenanters, the Nasmyths were architects and builders, professional but not wealthy.

Alexander had an aptitude for the business - he designed Dean Bridge - but he wanted to paint, and went to train at the Trustees Academy (the forerunner of the RSA) under Alexander Runciman (1736 – 1785). The painter Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) supported him, employing him as a studio assistant in London for four years, and a patron paid for a study tour in Italy. By the time he married Barbara, Alexander was painting portraits with side hustles in landscape design, architectural consultancy and designing scenery for the theatre.

Scotland’s fortunes were changing. New industries and improved agriculture were bringing increased wealth. Edinburgh’s New Town was being built, tastes were becoming more sophisticated and some people, at least, had money to spend. The time was right for a Scottish artist interpreting the Scottish landscape and, by 1792, Nasmyth was able to concentrate almost exclusively on landscape.

However, at the same time as becoming a successful painter himself, he was also teaching painting to his children. His eldest son Patrick moved to London where he set up a studio and became fashionable as “the English Hobbema”. In his lifetime and for some decades afterwards, his star outshone his father’s, though it is Alexander who is now recognised as the finer artist, marrying classical tropes with a lighter, freer touch which prefigured romanticism.

After Patrick, the Nasmyths had six daughters: Jane, Barbara, Margaret, Elizabeth, Anne and Charlotte. Like Mr Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, Alexander Nasmyth found himself with a family of daughters in a society in which unmarried women could be a costly liability. He was determined that they would have skills which might generate an income, so he taught them to do what he did best: paint.

James Nasmyth, the youngest of the family, who invented the steam hammer and went on to become rich and famous, wrote his autobiography in 1883, edited by the successful Victorian journalist Samuel Smiles. He wrote: “My father’s object was to render each and all of his children - whether boys or girls - independent on their arrival at mature years.” Accordingly, he sedulously kept up the attention of his daughters on fine art. “By this means he enabled them to assist in the maintenance of the family while at home and afterwards to maintain themselves by the exercise of their own abilities and industry after they had left. To accomplish his object he set up drawing classes which were managed by his six daughters, superintended by himself.”

The drawing school operated from the Nasmyth’s family home at 47 York Place became very successful. As Edinburgh grew wealthier, and war in Europe prevented well-heeled families from travelling, there were plenty of young women who wanted to learn art as an “accomplishment”. James writes of his sisters and their pupils taking picnic excursions “sketch-book and pencil in hand” to Arthur’s Seat, Duddingston Loch, Braid Hills, Roslin and along the coast to North Berwick.

To the Nasmyth women, however, drawing and painting were more than feminine accomplishments, and they were more than just competent teachers. They were artists in their own right. Johnson and Money write: “Interestingly, although they all had the same master and obviously worked closely together, each of them developed, as a landscape painter, her own particular characteristics and idiosyncrasies.”

Jane, the eldest of the sisters, was close to her father and her work mostly closely resembled his. Barbara was particularly good at woodland scenery, Margaret favoured lochs and mountains. Anne was fond of Highland scenes and impressive storm effects. Anne and Elizabeth married but continued painting in married life. The other four sisters remained in the family home. They seem to have been a close and supportive family, writing warm-hearted letters to one another when apart.

There are common characteristics in their paintings, and between their work and their father’s like a love of sweeping broad-leaved trees in the foreground. The work is detailed and careful; some of the sisters are more expressive than others. Alexander Nasmyth didn’t record his philosophy of painting, but it is recorded that he said to Clarkson Stanfield: “Young man, there is but one style an artist should endeavour to attain and that is the style of nature; the nearer you can get to that the better.”

More than teaching his daughters to paint, he taught them the business of being an artist, encouraging them to build up their own bodies of work and submit paintings to exhibitions. Records show that their work was exhibited in prestigious venues; Charlotte, for example, showed work at the Royal Academy. In 1840, the year Alexander died, a sale at Tait’s salerooms in Edinburgh featured 155 paintings by Alexander Nasmyth and seven of his children (Patrick and the six women).

After their father’s death, the sisters moved with their mother to Lancashire, where James lived, and on their mother’s death, to London. All six women lived to advanced age; Charlotte died in 1884 in her eightieth year. All continued to exhibit their work as older women.

While the Nasmyth sisters did not live independently as professional artists, they were clearly more than hobbyists. Johnson and Money comment that it is difficult to know how much income they derived from their art. However, they add: “They were certainly very professional in regard to their approach to their art and were at pains to keep up a regular stock of work available and submit examples frequently to leading exhibitions. Judging by the fact that only a few of their paintings appear in more than one exhibition or more than one place, they seem to have sold well.” Nearly all of their best work remains in private collections and we know little about their lives apart from their work.

Perhaps in time, more of their paintings will emerge into the public sphere, giving us the chance to explore in greater depth these six women who became accomplished painters in a time when the artistic sphere was very much a man’s world.

Explore more of The Fleming Collection here.