Sir Daniel Macnee (1806-1882) - Find a Grave Memorial

Scottish Portrait Painter, President of the Royal Scottish Academy. He was brought up in Glasgow where he became a pupil of portraitist and landscapist John Knox. There he met and worked alongside Horatio McCulloch and William Leighton Leitch – the noted water-colourist. He was first employed making anatomical drawings and then painting ornamental lids of snuff boxes at Cumnock, Strathclyde. At the age of about 19 he moved to Edinburgh where he studied at the Trustees' Academy, and supported himself by illustrating publications for William Home Lizars the engraver. In 1829 was admitted to the Royal Scottish Academy. He returned to Glasgow in 1830 and began to paint fancy heads and genre scenes, as well as portraits. He was clever at catching a good likeness, and he soon gained popularity as a portrait painter. He established a flourishing portrait studio and his sitters included wealthy merchants, pioneering industrialists and aristocrats. He also contributed regularly to Glasgow and Edinburgh exhibitions, as well as to the Royal Academy in London. In 1876 he was elected President of the Royal Scottish Academy. From then until his death he remained in Edinburgh, where, according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, "his genial social qualities and his inimitable powers as a teller of humorous Scottish anecdotes rendered him popular". Several of his works are held by the National Portrait Gallery in London and more than seventy of his portraits including one of his daughter Isabella, ‘Lady in Grey,' hang in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

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Bio by: Peter Cox