JOSEPH MILNE (SCOTTISH 1859-1911)
BUCKHAVEN HARBOUR
£3,024
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Session | 7th December 2023 at 18:00
Description
Signed, inscribed on stretcher verso, oil on canvas
Dimensions
51cm x 76cm (20in x 30in)
Footnote
Note: Joseph Milne mostly signed his paintings as ‘Joe Milne’. As a professional landscape artist, he painted many harbour scenes throughout his career: sailing ships, fishing boats, Thames barges and working boats of all kinds. Many of his harbour scenes were on the east coast of Scotland, but he had a particular connection to Buckhaven in Fife.
He was born in Aberdeen in 1859. He would become the eldest of eight children and, at some point in the 1860s, the family moved to Edinburgh. In his time training at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) Life Class from 1882 until 1886, he was awarded the Chalmer Prize and won the Maclaine Watters Medal in 1885. He began exhibiting at the RSA in 1877 and in 1880, he exhibited two Buckhaven paintings. One of these was also among his first exhibits at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts later that year.
Joe Milne’s attraction to Buckhaven may have involved his future wife Janet Thompson, whose family lived there. Her late father had been a fisherman in Buckhaven and she worked as a milliner. Janet and Joe married there in October 1884. Their first child was born in Buckhaven in August 1885, and he would grow up to be the artist John Maclauchlan Milne RSA.
We are grateful to Maurice Millar, author of 'The Missing Colourist: In Search of John Maclauchlan Milne RSA', for his help with researching this work.