WALLER HUGH PATON R.S.A., R.S.W. (SCOTTISH 1828-1895)
A WRECK ON SKYE COAST - 1868
£1,260
Auction: 26 June 2024 from 10:00 BST
Description
Signed and dated lower right, oil on board
Dimensions
18cm x 38cm (7in x 38in)
Footnote
Waller Hugh Paton was born in Wooers-Alley, Dunfermline. His family was artistic: his father was a damask designer, and his siblings Sir Joseph Noel Paton and Amelia Robertson Hill were both artists. From 1848, Waller Hugh Paton trained with the accomplished landscape and genre painter John Adam Houston, learning the importance of rigorous observation and the principles of perspective. John Ruskin was a family friend, and in 1853 Paton is likely to have attended the artist and critic’s Edinburgh lectures on the principles of Pre-Raphaelitism.
In March of 1879, the Art Journal wrote that Waller Hugh Paton’s landscapes possessed ‘as little of the human as must be, as much of the divine as may... although entirely faithful in feature to the locale, [his work] is handled with such delicate grace, and is so redolent of the sweet sanctity of perfect peace, that we seem to gaze rather on a fairy region than on any this world can offer’.