Donaldson, David Abercrombie, RSA
1916 – 1996
Born in Chryston on the outskirts of Glasgow, Donaldson, despite lacking any formal qualifications, studied at Glasgow School of Art (1932-37) winning the Haldane Travelling Scholarship in 1937 and travelling to Paris and Florence. In 1941 he won the RSA Guthrie Award. Despite his distaste for bureaucracy and a belief that students should just get on with painting rather than working to formal examinations he moved directly from being a student to becoming a part-time lecturer at GSA. He taught full time at Glasgow School of Art from 1944 and in 1967 he became the Head of the Department of Drawing and Painting, retiring in 1981. His own students and colleagues remember him as an inspiring and brilliant teacher who always taught by his own example. He is best known for his portrait work and received a number of official commissions, culminating in a commission to paint a portrait of Her Majesty the late Queen Elizabeth II, in 1966. In 1977 he was appointed Her Majesty's Painter and Limner in Ordinary in Scotland. Donaldson exhibited at the RSA from 1934 until 1996. He became an Associate Member of the RSA in 1951 and an Academician in 1962. The late W Gordon Smith (who ironically died the week before Donaldson) wrote his biography; 'David Donaldson, Painter and Limner to Her Majesty in Scotland,' Mainstream, 1996.
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