Robert Brough

This article is about the Scottish painter. For the English writer, see Robert Barnabas Brough.

Portrait of Robert Brough (c. 1900), by John Singer Sargent (detail)

Robert Brough (1872 – 21 January 1905) was a Scottish painter born in Invergordon, Ross and Cromarty.

He was educated in Aberdeen, and, whilst apprenticed for over six years as lithographer to Messrs Gibb & Co., attended the night classes at Gray's School of Art. He then entered the Royal Scottish Academy, and in the first year took the Stuart prize for figure painting, the Chalmers painting bursary, and the Maclame-Walters medal for composition.

After two years in Paris under J. P. Laurens and Benjamin-Constant at Julian's atelier, he settled in Aberdeen in 1894 as a portrait painter and political cartoonist. A portrait of Mr. W. D. Ross first drew attention to his talent in 1896, and in the following year he scored a marked success at the Royal Academy with his Fantaisie en Folie, which he bequeathed to the National Gallery of British Art (now the Tate gallery). Two of his paintings, Twixt Sun and Moon and Childhood of St. Anne of Brittany, were at the Venice municipal gallery. Brough's art was influenced by Henry Raeburn and by modern French training, but it strikes a very personal note.

Brough died from injuries received in a railway accident at Cudworth station in Yorkshire on 19 January 1905.

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  Fantaisie en Folie, 1897, Tate Gallery.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Brough, Robert". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.