Description
Here is a newspaper article on this painting:-
Murray Urquhart RBA…A Painters Life For Me.
For my first article of 2019 I have taken a beautifully simple yet very accomplished watercolour painting as my subject. The painting is of a small walled country lane meandering its way through the leafy countryside which is spattered with lovely, gentle summer sunshine. It is a somewhat pleasing painting which has been painted with subtle, muted tones and pastel shades that one could only achieve by using watercolours. It doesn’t have a title and is not labelled or identified so it could be anywhere in the country.
It was painted by the listed Scottish artist Murray McNeel Caird Urquhart. Urquhart was born in Kirkcudbright on April 24th 1880. Sadly, his father, Andrew Urquhart, a surgeon, died four months after he was born and his mother, Helen McNeel Caird Urquhart, died within two weeks of his birth. His maternal Grandfather was Procurator Fiscal for Wigtownshire and his paternal Grandfather was Reverend to the good people of Portpatrick also in Wigtownshire. Initially he and his older brother were brought up by his paternal grandparents before their daughter, Sarah Urquhart, decided she was better placed to bring up two young boys. So, the two lads moved into their aunt’s home in Edinburgh. Murray was listed in the 1901 census as a law student…however by 1903 he was a prize winner at the Edinburgh School of Art and graduated to the Slade School of Art in London, before moving on to the Westminster School of Art and finally the Academie Julian in Paris, where he studied for two years. Painting became his life, he exhibited more than 20 times at the Royal Academy, also exhibiting on numerous occasions at the Royal Society of British Artists (being elected a full member in 1914), the Royal Hibernian Society, the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour, Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts and the New English Art Club.
By 1911 he had married his first wife and settled in Bridport, Dorset. His two sons Andrew and Brian were born in 1914 and 1919 respectively. His second son Brian (who was a former Undersecretary-General to The United Nations) wrote an article in 2013 stating that one day in 1925 his father simply packed his paints and easels onto a bike and rode off into the sunset never to return. Within two years he had married his second wife. The pair moved around a lot from Meopham in Kent, to Kensington in London, finally settling in Bishop’s Lydeard in Somerset. Urquhart’s passion for constantly turning out painting after painting after painting was all that seemed to matter, although he never really put much effort into selling many of them, just earning enough to get by. Since his passing in 1972 at the age of 92, his paintings have become very popular, with the subtle pastel shades having become very much the style many people like, so his pictures have a very strong following.
