David Cowan Dobson R.B.A., (1894–1980) was a leading Scottish portrait artist who first exhibited at Royal Academy when aged only nineteen and began showing at the Royal Scottish Academy four years later.
It is said in the family that there was a Dobson wool mill in Dalry, owned and run by Thomas.
To make ends meet, Stanley also worked for an art dealer in London.
He was named after the eighteenth-century Scottish portrait painter, Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823), whom his father admired hugely.
Henry Raeburn Dobson became a leading society portrait painter in Edinburgh and Brussels.
He is said to have rented Kenmure Castle, in New Galloway, Kirkcudbrightshire, in the 1930s and 1940s to entertain and paint fashionable sitters.
He painted in the tradition of the academic nineteenth century with mostly a rather darker colour scheme, while his brother Henry, influenced by the Modernist movement in Edinburgh, painted more colourful portraits.