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Jamesone, George
(b Aberdeen, ?1589–90; d Aberdeen, ?Nov 1644). Scottish painter. He was the first native portrait painter of real ability; his certain extant works are exclusively busts and half-lengths. His father, Andrew Jamesone, a successful and wealthy mason, enjoyed social and political connections with the Scottish nobility that were to serve his son well. Jamesone was apprenticed to the painter John Anderson in 1612 at the age of 22; this period of training seems to have ended by 1617, although Jamesone’s earliest known work, a portrait of Sir Paul Menzies of Kinmundy (U. Aberdeen), dates from 1620. In 1624 he married the relatively wealthy Isabel Tosche and during the 1620s went on to produce numerous portraits of distinguished sitters. These include the attributed full-lengths of John Leslie, 6th Earl of Rothes (1625) and Anne Erskine, Countess of Rothes, with her Two Children (1626; both sold London, Christie’s, 22 June 1973, lots 16–17; for illustration of lot 16 see Thomson, fig. 23), as well as Mary Erskine, Countess Marischal (1626; Edinburgh, N.P.G.; see SCOTLAND, fig. 8) and Arthur Johnston (c. 1629; U. Aberdeen). About this time Jamesone began to establish connections in Edinburgh, opening a studio there in 1633, although he never gave up his Aberdeen practice. When Charles I arrived in the capital for his coronation in 1633, Jamesone was involved in making triumphal decorations for the event, supplying a set of roughly worked and brightly coloured portraits of the king’s ancestors (ex-Newbattle Abbey Coll., Lothian; sold Edinburgh, Dowell’s, 2 July 1971). By 1634 he was acquainted with Sir Colin Campbell, 8th Laird of Glenorchy, who became an important patron, with the artist perhaps also advising on Campbell’s art acquisitions. One notable series of pictures he made for Campbell is the Ladies of Glenorchy (e.g. Invereil House, Lothian; remainder dispersed at sale, Invereil House, 3 March 1969), a set of eight head-and-shoulders portraits, each in a feigned oval surround, of the wives of former Glenorchy lairds: these were intended as companion pieces to the genealogical set of Campbell’s male predecessors that had been painted at his Taymouth home in 1633 by an unknown German artist.
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