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Lizars, William Home
(b Edinburgh, 1788; d Jedburgh, 30 March 1859). Scottish painter and engraver. He was taught to engrave by his father, Daniel Lizars (d 1812), but he also studied painting at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh under John Graham (1754–1817) between 1802 and 1805; he was a contemporary there of David Wilkie. His earliest exhibited paintings were portraits, the most ambitious being the Earl of Buchan Presenting Henry Gattie with a Medal (exh. Edinburgh, 1808). In 1811 he exhibited two genre works in Edinburgh, Reading the Will and the Scotch Wedding (both Edinburgh, N.G.), which clearly reveal the influence of Wilkie, though they predate the latter’s treatment of the same subjects. The unfinished Interior of a Church (Edinburgh, Royal Scot. Acad.) suggests that Lizars might have developed into a genre artist of some originality, but after the death of his father in 1812 he concentrated increasingly on engraving, though he continued to exhibit sporadically until 1830. His first important engraving, the Landing of Mary Queen of Scots after W. C. Sheriff (1786–1805), was published in 1807. In his early career he also engraved banknotes and quickly established himself as the leading engraver in Edinburgh. In cooperation with his brother, the surgeon John Lizars, he produced a System of Anatomical Plates of the Human Body (Edinburgh, 1822). He was also the engraver chosen by J. J. Audubon for his Birds of America, on which he worked between 1826 and 1830. (He subsequently surrendered the contract, and his plates were recut.) He also produced topographical engravings in cooperation with various artists, including 16 engravings after Alexander Nasmyth for Sir Walter Scott’s Provincial and Border Antiquities of Scotland (1821).
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