Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Walter Geikie

GEIKIE, Walter (1795–1837), a Scotch subject-painter, was born at Edinburgh, November 9, 1795. In his second year he was attacked by a nervous fever by which he permanently lost the faculty of hearing, but through the careful attention of his father he was enabled to obtain a good education. His artistic talent was first manifested, while he was still very young, by attempts to cut out representations of objects in paper, and to draw figures with chalk on floors and walls. Before he had the advantage of the instruction of a master, he had attained considerable proficiency in sketching both figures and landscapes from nature, and in 1812 he was admitted into the drawing academy of the board of Scotch manufactures, where he made very rapid progress in the use of the pencil. He first exhibited in 1815, and was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1831, and a fellow in 1834. He died on the 1st August 1837, and was interred in the Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh. Owing to his want of feeling for colour Geikie was not a successful painter in oils, but he sketched in India ink with great truth and humour the scenes and characters of Scottish lower-class life in his native city. The characteristics he depicts are somewhat obvious and superficial, but his humour is never coarse, and he is surpassed by few in the power of representing the broadly ludicrous and the plain and homely aspects of humble life. A series of etchings which exhibit very high excellence were published by him in 1829–31, and a collection of eighty-one of these was republished posthumously in 1841, with a biographical introduction by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Bart.