Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/John Thomson

THOMSON, JOHN (1778-1840), amateur landscape painter—Thomson of Duddingston, as he is commonly styled,—was born on September 1, 1778, at Dailly, Ayrshire. His father, grandfather, and, as we are informed, great-grandfather also, were clergymen of the Church of Scotland. The father determined that his son should follow the ancestral profession, and, greatly against his natural bent,—for all his thoughts turned instinctively towards art,—he acceded to the parental wish. He studied in the university of Edinburgh; and, residing with his elder brother, Thomas Thomson, afterwards celebrated as an antiquarian and feudal lawyer, he made the acquaintance of Francis Jeffrey and other young members of the Scottish bar afterwards notable. The pursuit of art, however, was not abandoned; during the recess he sketched in the country, and, while attending his final college session, he studied for a month under Alexander Nasmyth. After his father's death he became, in 1800, his successor as minister of Dailly; and in 1805 he was translated to the parish of Duddingston, close to Edinburgh. The practice of art was now actively resumed, and it came to be continued throughout life—apparently without any very great detriment to pastoral duties. Thomson's popularity as a painter increased with his increasing artistic skill; and, having mastered his initial scruples against receiving artistic fees, on being offered £15 for a landscape—reassured by "Grecian" Williams's stout assertion that the work was "worth thrice the amount"—the minister of Duddingston began to dispose of the productions of his brush in the usual manner. In 1830 he was made an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy. Besides that of art, Thomson had other singularly varied tastes and aptitudes. He was an accomplished performer on violin and flute, an exact and well-read student of physical science, and one of the writers on optics in the early numbers of the Edinburgh Review. His life passed peacefully away in the kindly and charitable discharge of his clerical duties, varied by the enthusiastic pursuit of his art, and the enjoyment of intercourse with a singularly wide and eminent circle of friends, which, among artists, included Turner and Wilkie, and among men of letters Wilson and Scott,—the latter of whom desired that Thomson, instead of Turner, should have illustrated the collected edition of his works. He died at Duddingston on the 27th of October 1840 (not the 20th, as stated by some authorities). Thomson was twice married, and his second wife, the widow of Mr Dalrymple of Cleland, was herself also a skilful amateur artist.

Thomson holds an honourable position as the first powerful landscapist that Scotland produced, and he is still among her greatest. His style was founded, in the first instance, upon the practice of the Dutch masters; but ultimately he submitted to the influence of the Poussins and the Italians, rightly believing that their method—in the richer solemnity of its colour and the deeper gravity of its chiaroscuro—was more truly fitted for the portrayal of the scenery of Scotland, more in harmony with the gloom and the glory of its mountains and its glens and the passion of its wave-vexed cliffs. But to the study of the art of the past he joined a close and constant reference to nature which kept his own work fresh and original, though, of course, he never even approached such scientific accuracy in the rendering of natural form and effect as is expected from even the tyro in our recent schools of landscape. His art is clearly distinguished by “style”; at their best, his works show skilful selection in the leading lines of their composition and admirable qualities of abstract colour and tone. Thomson is fairly represented in the Scottish National Gallery; and the Aberlady Bay of that collection, with the soft infinity of its clouded grey sky, and its sea which leaps and falls again in waves of sparkling and of shadowed silver, is fit to rank among the triumphs of Scottish art.