1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Macnee, Sir Daniel

MACNEE, SIR DANIEL (1806–1882), Scottish portrait painter, was born at Fintry in Stirlingshire. At the age of thirteen he was apprenticed, along with Horatio Macculloch and Leitch the water-colour painter, to John Knox, a landscapist of some repute. He afterwards worked for a year as a lithographer, was employed by the Smiths of Cumnock to paint the ornamental lids of their planewood snuff-boxes, and, having studied in Edinburgh at the “Trustees’ Academy,” supporting himself meanwhile by designing and colouring book illustrations for Lizars the engraver, he established himself as an artist in Glasgow, where he became a fashionable portrait painter. He was in 1829 admitted a member of the Royal Scottish Academy; and on the death of Sir George Harvey in 1876 he was elected president, and received the honour of knighthood. From this period till his death, on the 18th of January 1882, he resided in Edinburgh, where his genial social qualities and his inimitable powers as a teller of humorous Scottish anecdote rendered him popular.