Daniel Macnee

Who was Daniel Macnee?

Sir Daniel Macnee FRSE RSA, was a Scottish portrait painter who served as president of the Royal Scottish Academy.

He was born at Fintry in 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, where, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "his genial social qualities and his inimitable powers as a teller of humorous Scottish anecdotes rendered him popular".

Several of Macnee's works are held by the National Portrait Gallery in London and at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.