JOHN BURR R.B.A. A.R.W.S. (1831-1893)

John Burr was born in Edinburgh in 1834. Both he and his younger brother, Alexander Hohenlohe Burr (1835-1899), became practicing artists. At the age of fourteen the older Burr began painting portraits of local notables in small Scottish towns. Five years later he entered the Trustee's Academy in Edinburgh where he studied under Robert Scott Lauder (1803-1869). While a student he began exhibiting at the Royal Scottish Academy, and his contributions of 1857 and 1858 were purchased by the Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland. In the year 1861 both Burr brothers moved to London. They began exhibiting at the Royal Academy the next year.



Almost all of the eighteen works that the elder Burr exhibited at the Academy were precise, often humorous genre scenes reminiscent of the work of his compatriot Thomas Faed (1826-1900) but lacking somewhat in the latter's sympathy for his subjects. As one critic put it, the characters depicted by Burr "are always characters." Nevertheless, he made a reputation for himself, and was an Associate of the Old Watercolour Society and President of the Society of British Artists, preceding Whistler in that post. He stopped exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1882 and died in 1893, spending the last years of his life in relative obscurity.