Milne, John Maclauchlan Milne, RSA
1885 – 1957
Milne was born in Buckhaven, Fife in August 1885 and raised in Edinburgh, the son of the landscape painter Joseph Milne. He returned to Scotland, after living in Canada and then London, and settled in Dundee in 1908/09. He married in 1911 and lived in Kingoodie, on the north shore of the Firth of Tay, and at several Dundee addresses. He joined the Royal Flying Corps in January 1917 and served in northern France and Belgium during the First World War. After the war he returned to Dundee to resume his career. He was painting in Paris and the Loire Valley in 1920/21. His studio in Dundee was at 132a Nethergate from about 1921 until 1940. In 1924 he went to the Côte d’Azur in France and painted at Cassis and St Tropez. In subsequent years in the 1920s he painted all along this coast from L’Estaque, west of Marseilles, to St Paul de Vence, near Nice. St Tropez was a favourite location of many of his paintings. He was supported by collectors in Dundee, including William Boyd, retired Managing Director of James Keiller & Son Ltd and Matthew Justice of Thomas Justice & Sons Ltd. In the early 1930s, he painted in Perthshire and the Scottish Central and North-west Highlands. He visited the Island of Iona (1937, ’38 and ’39). In 1940 he left Dundee for the Island of Arran where he met his second wife. They lived at High Corrie until near the end of his life in October 1957. There are over 35 of his works in public collections. He exhibited regularly at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Glasgow Institute for the Fine Arts and, for a period, with the Society of Scottish Artists and elsewhere. He exhibited at the RSA Annual Exhibitions from 1912 until 1958. Milne was elected an Associate Member of the RSA in 1933 and a full Academician in 1937. He was also the Warden at Hospitalfield from 1956. He was in the same places, doing the same thing, at about the same times, as his four contemporaries who would later be presented as ‘The Scottish Colourists’ (S.J.Peploe, F.C.B.Cadell, J.D.Fergusson and G.L.Hunter). He is claimed as ‘The Dundee Colourist’ and by others as ‘The Fifth Scottish Colourist’. A Centenary Exhibition was mounted by Dundee Art Gallery in 1985 with a modest publication accompanying. ref. ‘The Missing Colourist – the search for John Maclauchlan Milne, RSA’ – Maurice Millar [ www.themissingcolourist.co.uk 2022].
Works in which this creator appears
- John Maclauchlan Milne
- John Maclauchlan Milne and Elizabeth Livingstone Mackellar on their wedding day
- John Maclauchlan Milne and Elizabeth Livingstone Mackellar on their wedding day
- John Maclauchlan Milne in later life
- John Maclauchlan Milne at work in his studio
- John Maclauchlan Milne at work in his studio
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