Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Harvey, Sir George

HARVEY, Sir George (1806–1876), a Scottish painter and president of the Royal Scottish Academy, was the son of a watchmaker, and was born at St Ninians, near Stirling, in February 1806. Soon after his birth his parents remove to Stirling, where George was apprenticed to a bookseller. His love for art having, however, become very decided, he in his eighteenth year entered the Trustees' Academy at Edinburgh. Here he so distinguished himself that in 1826 he was invited by the Scottish artists, who had resolved to found a Scottish academy, to join it as an associate. Indeed it was chiefly to the zeal and judgment of Harvey and of two others that it owed its early success. Harvey's first picture, A Village School, was exhibited in 1826 at the Edinburgh Institution; and from the time of the opening of the Academy in the following year he continued annually to enrich its exhibitions by a succession of pictures which, although they never obtained much fame beyond the limits of Scotland, appealed with such effect to Scottish sentiment as to win for him in his native land an unrivalled popularity. His best known pictures are those depicting historical episodes in religious history from a puritan or evangelical point of view, such as Covenanters Preaching, Covenanters' Communion, John Bunyan and his Blind Daughter, Sabbath Evening, and the Quitting of the Manse. He was, however, equally successful in subjects not directly religious; and The Bowlers, A Highland Funeral, The Curlers, A Schule Skailin', and Children Blowing Bubbles in the Churchyard of Greyfriars, Edinburgh, manifest the same close observation of character, artistic conception, and conscientious elaboration of details. In The Night Mail and Dawn Revealing the New World to Columbus the aspects of nature are made use of in different ways, but with equal happiness, to lend impressiveness and solemnity to human concerns. It was chiefly in his later years that he devoted his attention to landscape, the branch of art in which on the whole he was most successful, and there perhaps in suggesting the decp calm and the sweet and varied charm which broods among the hills when nature is at rest. He also devoted some attention to portraiture, among his works in this branch of art being a portrait of Professor Wilson, now at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh. In 1829 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy, and in 1864 he succeeded Sir J. W. Gordon as president. He received the honour of knighthood in 1867. His death took place at Edinburgh, January 22, 1876.

Sir George Harvey was the author of a paper on the ' Colour of the Atmosphere," read before the Edinburgh Royal Society, and afterwards published with illustrations in Good IVords; and in 1870 he published a small volume entitled Notes of the Early History of the Royal Scottish Academy. Seleetions from the Works of Sir George Harvey, P.R.S.A., described by the Rev. A. L. Simpson, F.S.A. Scot., and photographed by Thomas Annan, appeared at Edinburgh in 1869.