James Paterson

James Paterson PRSW RSA RWS (21 August 1854 – 25 January 1932), was a Scottish landscape and portrait painter associated with the Glasgow Boys movement of artists. He is best known for his landscape paintings of Dumfriesshire, where he lived, at Moniaive from 1885 to 1905.

Life

James Paterson was born at Blantyre, near Glasgow on 21 August 1854, the eldest son of Andrew Paterson (1819-1907) and his wife Margaret Hunter (1817-1901). The Hunter family were sewed muslin manufacturers in Glasgow. When his father was orphaned at nineteen his uncle James Hunter appointed him a foreman in his warehouse and took him into partnership two years later at the early age of twenty-one. His father was a good watercolourist as well as one of the earliest amateur photographers in Scotland and most of his family developed artistic interests. James' brother William, born 1859, later became the owner of a gallery in Bond Street, London and his youngest brother Alexander, born 1862, became an architect.

James studied at the Glasgow School of Art under Robert Greenlees. From 1877 he studied in Paris under Louis Jacquesson de La Chevreuse (1839-1903) and Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921). A couple of years after returning to Scotland he married, in 1884, Eliza Grier Ferguson, daughter of an engineer, William Ferguson, and Janet Cooper. As a wedding present, Andrew Paterson gave the couple a cottage called Kilneiss, in Moniaive, Dumfriesshire, which was extensively modified and enlarged to designs by Glasgow architect Sir John James Burnet (1857-1938) and his brother Alexander Nisbet Paterson (1862-1947) in 1894.