English, 1824-1901 Scottish painter, illustrator, sculptor and collector. From his earliest years he drew avidly, seeking inspiration from ancient history, the Bible and from tales of romance and legend. His father was a keen antiquarian, and his habit of collecting items of historical interest and artistic merit was inherited by his son who amassed a collection, which included arms and armour, now in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. He used items from the collection in a large number of his paintings such as 'I wonder who lived in there?' (1867; Mrs Eva No?l Findlay priv. col.), the Fairy Raid (1867; Glasgow A.G. & Mus.), In die Malo (1881) and Oskold and the Ell? Maids (1874). After three years as head designer in one of the biggest sewn-muslin factories in Paisley, Strathclyde, Paton went to London in 1842. Although he did not take a studentship at the Royal Academy Schools, it was there that he met John Everett Millais, and they became lifelong friends. He won prizes in the Westminster Hall competitions in 1845 and 1847,   Related Paintings of Paton, Sir Joseph Noel :. | The Bluidie Tryst | Under the Sea I | Under the Sea II | In Memoraim | Puck and the Fairy |
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OCHTERVELT, Jacob
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1634-1682 Dutch painter. According to Houbraken, he and Pieter de Hooch were fellow students of the Dutch Italianate Nicolaes Berchem in Haarlem, probably between 1646, when Berchem returned from Italy, and 1655, when Ochtervelt married Dirkje Meesters in the Dutch Reformed Church in Rotterdam. Ochtervelt's earliest known works reveal the influences of a number of Dutch Italianate painters. Landscapes with figures, such as Hunters and Shepherds in a Landscape (1652; Karl-Marx-Stadt, St?dt. Kstsamml.), owe much to Berchem in subject and composition. They may also have been partly inspired by similar landscapes by Jan Baptist Weenix and Ludolf de Jongh. Towards the mid-1650s Ochtervelt began painting garden scenes
ROMNEY, George
English Painter, 1734-1802 The son of a cabinetmaker, George Romney was born in Dalton, Lancashire. He was apprenticed in 1755 to Christopher Steele, a provincial portrait painter, but was largely self-taught. Romney's ambition was to become a history painter. In 1762 he moved to London, where he studied the Duke of Richmond's collection of casts of antique sculpture and established himself as a portraitist. He went to Italy in 1773, and after his return in 1775 he became the favorite painter of high society. Morbidly sensitive and retiring, Romney kept aloof from the social world of his sitters and from the Royal Academy. By 1782 he was under the spell of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton and the mistress of Nelson, who sat for him as Circe, a Bacchante, Cassandra, the Pythian Priestess, Joan of Arc, St. Cecilia, Mary Magdalene, and other impersonations he suggested. In the 1780s he executed a number of Eton leaving portraits, which established him as the supreme interpreter of aristocratic adolescence in his age. For much of his life in London, Romney was under the wing of the poet William Hayley, who encouraged him in the choice of subjects from Milton and Shakespeare as well as the Bible and Greek tragedy. Romney's history paintings are today chiefly known from engravings, like the dramatic Tempest (1787-1790) commissioned for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. A large number of drawings for these projects survive. Romney had married early in life an uneducated woman whom he did not bring to London but to whom he returned when his health finally gave way. Ill health and the facility with which he converted his early realistic style into a fashionable sketchlike formula for idealizing his sitters probably account for an unevenness of execution that has partially justified his critics. Unlike Joshua Reynolds, Romney did not enter into the character of his sitters, unless they possessed nervous traits like his own, for example, the moving portrait William Cowper. But he was psychologically involved with the generalized charms of youth, beauty, and breeding that he admired in his aristocratic sitters, and by combining a neoclassic purity of line with free but masterly brushwork he achieved a number of incomparable images which transcend the realism of portraiture.
Erskine Nicol
British Genre Painter , (1825-1904) was an Irish/Scottish painter. A student of William Allan, Nicol taught in Dublin, Ireland, from 1845-50, at the height of the Irish famine, and considered himself as much Irish as he was Scottish. Much of his work portrays the injustices inflicted upon the Irish population during the 19th century. He was made an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1855 and an Academician in 1859. Nicol exhibited at the Royal Academy and was made an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1866