Tour Scotland photographs and videos from my tours of Scotland. Photography and videography, both old and new, from beautiful Scotland, Scottish castles, seascapes, rivers, islands, landscapes, standing stones, lochs and glens.
Old photograph of St Molios Church in Shiskine, Island of Arran, Scotland. This church was built in 1889 to a design by J J Burnet. The tower contains a single bell. Set into the west wall of the tower is a carved stone grave slab, possibly of a 13th century abbot taken from Clauchen graveyard.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
Tour Scotland travel photography of a portrait painting of a woman by Daniel MacNee, who was born on 4 June 1806, in Fintry, Stirlingshire. At the age of thirteen he was apprenticed, along with Horatio McCulloch and Leitch the water colourist, to the landscape artist John Knox. He afterwards worked for a year as a lithographer, and was employed by a company in Cumnock, Ayrshire, to paint the ornamental lids of their sycamore wood snuff boxes. He studied in Edinburgh at the Trustees' Academy, where he supported himself by illustrating publications for William Home Lizars the engraver. Moving to Glasgow, he established himself as a fashionable portrait painter. In 1829 he was admitted as a member of the Royal Scottish Academy; and on the death of Sir George Harvey in 1876 he was elected president, and was knighted. From then until his death he remained in Edinburgh. Several of Macnee's works are held by the National Portrait Gallery in London, England and at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. Macnee is buried in Dean Cemetery in western Edinburgh with his wife Mary Buchanan, and children, Constance and Thomas Wiseman Macnee. They lie against the north wall of the northern extension.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
Tour Scotland photograph of a painting by William Hackstouns, who was born in 1855 to William Haxton at Balbreakie, Kennoway, Fife, Scotland. He was articled to Horatio Kelson Bromhead in Glasgow where he became acquainted with his fellow pupils George Jack and Thomas Hamilton Crawford. It is unclear whether Hackstoun found paid employment as an architect in London, England, to which he moved at the end of his articles, but he quickly became attached to the James Marjoribanks MacLaren, William Flockhart and George Washington Browne circle. He also made contact with John Ruskin who was attracted to his watercolours and arranged for him to stay near his house at Coniston, commissioning drawings of the French cathedral towns: and it was Ruskin who persuaded him to change the spelling of his name to Hackstoun. Hackstoun was a fine bass singer and studied for a time at the Royal College of Music in London and then with Campbell in Italy with the intention of following an operatic career. Ruskin persuaded him to return to watercolours. After a number of years in London during which he was financially supported by the art critic Dugald Sutherland MacColl, he settled for some years in St Andrews painting Fife landscapes, villages and seascapes. He was living at 148 Hill Street, Glasgow in 1916 and was in London when he died on 8 June 1921.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
Tour Scotland photograph of a Highlanders engraving by James Tibbetts Willmore who often visited Scotland. James, born in September 1800 at Bristnal's End, Handsworth, then Staffordshire, now West Midlands, England, was an English engraver. At the age of fourteen Willmore was apprenticed to the Birmingham engraver William Radclyffe. In 1823 he went to London where he worked for Charles Heath for three years. He later worked on the plates of William Brockedon's Passes of the Alps and Turner's England and Wales. He engraved after Chalon, Leitch, Stanfield, Landseer, Eastlake, Creswick and Ansdell, and especially after Turner, from whose Alnwick Castle by Moonlight, The Old Téméraire, Mercury and Argus, Ancient Rome, and the subjects of the rivers of France, he executed many admirable plates. He was elected an associate engraver of the Royal Academy in 1843. He died on the 12th of March 1863.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
