Joseph Farquharson - And All the Air a Solemn Silence Holds, c.1900

1846-1935)
Joseph Farquharson was a Scottish painter who combined a career as a painter with his inherited role as a Scottish laird. He trained at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, and during the 1860s he was strongly influenced by the landscape painter Peter Graham. The watershed in his career was marked by three or four winters spent from 1880 onwards in Paris in the studio of Carolus-Duran. An admirer of Velazquez, Carolus-Duran taught his students to use the brush straight away and think in terms of form and colour. As a result Farquharson's work was always characterised by richly handled paint.

Back at his native Finzean in Scotland he adapted French plein-air techniques to the Scottish climate where he painted the great snowscapes on which his reputation rested.