[3] He took up painting while working as a grocer's apprentice and he attended evening art classes in Edinburgh - his biographer (Agnes E. Mackay who was his niece) indicated that he often walked the eight miles there and back.

[6] Melville sold the painting to James Hunter Annandale, a Lasswade paper manufacturer, and this partially financed the artist's studies in Paris from 1878 to 1880.

[8] Here he began to learn about the intricacies of watercolour painting although his niece writes that he spent much time admiring the work of other artists - she mentions Monet's Les Didons Blancs as an influence with its movement, colour and light.

He seemed keen to find peasant models who would pose en plein air following in the footsteps of the work of French rural Naturalists.

To convey strong Middle Eastern light, he developed a technique of using watercolour on a base of wet paper with gouache applied to it.

He was at his best in his watercolours of Eastern life and colour and his Venetian scenes, but he also painted several striking portraits in oils and a powerful composition of The Return from the Crucifixion which remained unfinished at his death in 1904.