[Soft Ground Etchings]. [Scotland]. George Fennell Robson. Scenery of the Grampian Mountains; Illustrated by Forty...

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Robson's Scenery of the Grampian Mountains

"Robson first published his wonderful views of the Scottish highlands in the work at hand published in 1814 with forty soft-ground etched plates. It was reissued in 1819 with hand-coloured aquatints. George Fennell Robson, 1788-1833, watercolour painter, was one of the twenty-three children of John Robson (1739-1824) by his second wife, Charlotte, was born at Durham in 1788. He began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1807, and published in 1808 a print of Durham, the profits of which enabled him to visit Scotland, where he wandered over the mountains, dressed as a shepherd, with Scott's 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' in his pocket. In 1810 he began to exhibit landscapes in the Bond Street gallery of the Associated Painters, of which short-lived society he was a member. The fruits of his journey north, which inspired him with the beauty of mountain scenery, were first shown at the exhibition of 1811, to which, and to that of the following year, he sent drawings of the Trossachs and Loch Katrine. In 1813 he began to exhibit with the Society of Painters in Oil and Watercolours, and in 1814 published 'Scenery of the Grampians,' which contained forty outlines of mountain landscape, etched on soft ground by Henry Morton after his drawings." (DNB).

Abbey, Scenery, 504, 506. Prideaux, p. 350.