ECA Main Building and Hunter Building, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3 9DF, United Kingdom
Farquharson trained at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh (now Edinburgh College of Art) during the 1860s.
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Joseph Farquharson attended the Life School at the Royal Scottish Academy.
ECA Main Building and Hunter Building, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3 9DF, United Kingdom
Farquharson trained at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh (now Edinburgh College of Art) during the 1860s.
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Joseph Farquharson attended the Life School at the Royal Scottish Academy.
Farquharson was born in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, on May 4, 1846. His mother, Alison Mary Ainslie, was a celebrated beauty. Farquharson's father Francis Farquharson was a doctor and laird of Finzean. He was the brother of Robert Farquharson, a Scottish doctor and Liberal politician.
Joseph Farquharson spent his early days in his father's house in Northumberland Street below Queen Street Gardens and later at Eaton Terrace beyond the Dean Bridge, Edinburgh and at Finzean, the family estate in the highlands.
The young Farquharson received his education in Edinburgh and was permitted to paint on Saturdays using his father's paint box. Having received his own box of paints as a gift at the age of 12, Joseph Farquharson went on to exhibit his first artwork at the Royal Scottish Academy the following year.
Farquharson trained at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh (now Edinburgh College of Art) during the 1860s. He had studied under the Scottish landscape artist Peter Graham for twelve years. Then Joseph Farquharson attended the Life School at the Royal Scottish Academy.
Farquharson exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1873. Like other leading Aberdeen artists, for example, John Philip and William Dyce, he decided to leave Edinburgh and move to London in order to win a wider audience and patrons.
During the 1870s and 1880s, Joseph Farquharson spent a lot of time at Carolus-Duran' studio in Paris. In 1883 tha artist achieved success after the sale of his artwork The Joyless Winter Day to the Chantrey Fund (now the Tate Gallery). His first major portrait painting, Miss Alice Farquhar, was exhibited in 1884. However, he was most famous for his works depicting sheep and his best-known works often include a human figure. Other subjects of his paintings were burns and fly fishing.
Many of Farquharson's artworks were executed in the north east of Scotland at his beloved Finzean. During the period of 1885-1893, the artist made a number of journeys to Egypt. He produced a number of pictures inspired by his travels there, among them were The Egyptian and On the Banks of the Nile outside Cairo.
The majority of Joseph Farquharson's paintings were characterized by unusual and sometimes long titles. It was because many of them were taken from poems by Shakespeare, Burns, Milton, and Gray.
In 1915 Farquharson exhibited over 200 pictures at the Royal Academy of Arts. In addition, he displayed 73 at the Royal Society of Arts and 181 at the Fine Art Society. He also exhibited his paintings at the Royal College of Art and the Tate Gallery. Walter Sickert, the renowned artist-critic, made Farquharson the subject of his essay comparing him favourably with Gustave Courbet.
The remarkable realism typical of Farquharson's oeuvre can be attributed to his desire to work en plein air. This had to be carried out in a special way adapted to the severe Scottish climate. Joseph Farquharson had created a painting hut on wheels with a stove and large glass window for observing the landscape. Furthermore, in order to achieve a maximum realistic result when painting the sheep which frequently appear in his snowscapes, he used a flock of "imitation" sheep which could be placed in the landscape whenever it was required. In later life, Joseph Farquharson spent time painting mainly flower pictures and some portraits.
Joseph Farquharson was a well-known artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is most famous for his winter landscapes, often featuring sheep and often depicting dusk or dawn.
In 2008 the original of the 1901 painting Beneath the Snow Encumbered Branches broke the surface. The painting was expected to fetch up to £70,000 when it was offered for sale by auction at Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh. In fact, it was sold for £147,600.
Today, the artist is represented at the Tate, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and in Bristol, Manchester, Aberdeen, and elsewhere in Britain.
Sun Pepped o'er the Hill
Driving Snow
Blow, Blow, Thou Wintery Wind
The Sere and the Yellow Leaf
The Forest Path
The Weary Waste of Snow, Forest of Birse, Aberdeenshire
Winter
Corn Stooks
Self-Portrait
Herding Sheep in a Winter Landscape at Sunset
Where Winter Holds its Sway
Sheep in the Snow
Mrs Farquharson of Finzean
The Silent Evening Hour
The Feugh
When snow the pasture sheets
Painter George Paul Chalmers
The Winding Dee
Winter
Silence of the Snow, Bucket Mill on the Feugh, Finzean
Self Portrait
The Sun Had Closed the Winter Day
Summertime
Harvesting, Forest of Birse, Aberdeenshire
Through the Crisp Air
The Parasol
Afterglow
Now Came Still Evening On
Delphiniums in a Wooded Landscape
The Sun Fast Sinks in the West
O'er Snow Clad Pastures, When the Sky Grew Red
Day's Dying Glow
Guide Bridge
Dawn
The Weary Waste of Snow
Cauld Blaws the Wind Frae East to West
West with Evening Glows
Feluccas on the Nile
In Deep Mid Winter
The Hour of Prayer
Fir Trees in the Glen
The Garden Bower at Finzean
Rugged Pasture
Study for At Freezing Point
Peat Moss, Poolewe
The Sun Had Closed the Winter's Day
Evening
Currarie Glen, near Ballantrae, South Ayrshire
The Day Was Sloping towards His Western Bower
A Wet Day
Sheep in a Snowstorm
Evening
On the Dee near Woodend, Aberdeenshire
The Orange Seller
Portrait of a Lady
The Edge of the Wood
Tween the gloamin' and the mirk when the kye comes hame
Scots Pines, Sunset
The Stormy Blast
The Joyless Winter Day
And the Sun Peeped O'er Yon Southland Hills
At Close of Day
Woodland Scene
And All the Air a Solemn Silence Holds
When the West with Evening Glows
Yon Yellow Sunset Dying in the West
The Fading Many Coloured Woods
William Littlejohn, Bank Agent
The Shortening Winter's Day is near a Close
A Pastoral
Autumn Gold
In the Shade
Loch Duich and the Five Sisters
A Corner of My Garden at Finzean
A Winter's Morning
The Orra Man
A Walk in the Snow
Sheep
The Garden at Finzean, Aberdeenshire
When the West with Evening Glows
A Scottish Interior, the Box Bed
When Snow the Pasture Sheets
Market on the Nile
Farquharson was elected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1900, in 1915 he became Royal Academician and in 1922 Senior Royal Academician.
Joseph Farquharson was very patriotic and knowledgeable about Scottish literature. He painted so many scenes of cattle and sheep in the snow, that he was nicknamed "Frozen Mutton Farquharson."
Farquharson inherited the title of Laird after the death of his elder brother Robert in 1918. So his other nickname was "The Painting Laird."
