Hume Nisbet

James Hume Nisbet (8 August 1849 – 4 June 1923) was a Scottish-born novelist and artist. Many of his thrillers are set in Australia.

Youth

Nisbet was born in Stirling, Scotland, and received special artistic training, and was educated under the Rev. Dr. Culross (later of Bristol College) up to the age of fifteen.

He moved to Australia at sixteen and spent about seven years there, during which time he travelled to Tasmania, New Zealand, and the South Sea Islands, painting, sketching, writing poetry and stories, and making notes for future work. He spent one year of the period acquiring theatrical experience at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, under the actor Richard Stewart.

Painting

Nisbet returned to London in 1872, and spent some time in studying and copying pictures in the National Gallery and in South Kensington. At the end of the next year he went back to Scotland and devoted himself to art, with an occasional lapse into literature. For eight years he was art master of the Watt Institution and School of Art, Edinburgh. He speaks with bitterness about his lack of success as a painter in a volume called Where Art Begins, which he published in 1892.

Among his best-known paintings are "Eve's first Moonrise," "The Flying Dutchman," "The Dream of Sardanapalus," four pictures of "The Ancient Mariner," and "The Battle of Dunbar."

Writing

Nisbet produced a large volume of writing. Many of Nisbet's volumes were of ghost stories. These include Paths of the Dead (1899), Stories Weird and Wonderful (1900), and The Haunted Station (1894) whose title story (about a haunted property or "station" in the Australian Outback) has often been reprinted.