William (Bill) Crosbie was a Scottish painter born in Hankow, China to Scottish parents. He attended Glasgow Academy and the Glasgow School of Art before travelling in Europe on a Haldane Travelling Scholarship. He studied under Léger and Maillol in Paris from 1937 to 1939. Crosbie was at the centre of what he once described as "a little local Renaissance", which included Hugh MacDiarmid, J D Fergusson, James Bridie, T J Honeyman, and Basil Spence. He produced illustrations for books and designed the scenery for a ballet. Crosbie was among the finest and most singular Scottish painters of the twentieth century. His paintings hang in all the major museums and galleries in Scotland as well as the Royal Collection and the British Museum in London, and in private collections throughout the United Kingdom and abroad

William Crosbie’s time as an art student in Paris between 1937 and 1939 brought him into contact with two of the greatest artists then in France: first when studying painting under Fernand Leger and later in taking drawing lessons from Aristide Maillol. The influence of each can at times be discerned in the developing strands of Crosbie's own work in the coming decades – and innovative echoes of Maillol appear in the statuesque nudes that Crosbie drew and painted from the late 1940s onwards.