James Paterson was a Scottish landscape painter who settled in Edinburgh and produced several accomplished portraits of some of his notable contemporaries. In a talk to the Edinburgh Photographic Society he declared : "In comparison with drawing, as a means of penetrating and recording for oneself impressions, photography is of far inferior value."

Paterson came from a prosperous Glasgow textile family, and grew up in an era when being an artist was disapproved. He held down a job while studying at the Glasgow School of Art*, and enjoyed tuition under A. D. Robertson, widely regarded as one of Glasgow's finest watercolourists. Financed by his father, he set out in 1876 for Paris to study under Louis Jacquesson de La Chevreuse an...