John Adam Plimmer Houston, RI ROI RSA (1812-1884)
Best known in his time for scenes of Cavaliers and Roundheads, John Adam Houston is now most admired for his landscape watercolours.
He was born of Scottish parents at Gwydyr Castle, Wales, on 25 December 1812. Moving to Scotland as a child, he was educated in Dalkeith, while his father became a small-scale manufacturer in Renfrewshire. He studied art at the Trustees’ Academy, Edinburgh, winning the drawing prize in his third year, and then leaving for London, where he worked mainly as a portraitist. In 1836, he exhibited for the first time, showing Don Quixote in his Study at the British Institution. Beginning to exhibit regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy from 1838, he returned to Edinburgh three years later to deal with family matters.
Almost immediately he produced and exhibited the ambitious composition, The Watchfire: Soldiers of Cromwell Disputing on the Scriptures, which was purchased by the Association of the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland. Both before and after he settled in Edinburgh, he travelled extensively through France, Germany and Italy, both to increase his artistic knowledge and to improve his health.
From the 1840s, Houston exhibited landscape watercolours of the Continent and Scotland in the Watercolour Room of the RSA. He was elected an associate of the RSA in 1842, and a full academician three years later. By the following decade, watercolours of the Scottish Highlands dominated his output and revealed an increasing adherence to Pre-Raphaelite principles. Such a direction may have been encouraged by Waller Hugh Paton, from whom he took lessons, and by the experience of hearing John Ruskin lecture in Edinburgh in 1853. In 1858, he moved to London, in the hope of minimising discomforting chest pains. There he exhibited mainly at the Royal Academy, while being elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours (1879) and the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils (1883). He died in London on 2 December 1884.
