James Archer (artist)

James Archer RSA (10 June 1823 – 3 September 1904), was a Scottish painter of portraits, genre works, landscapes and historical scenes.

[5] He was educated at the Royal High School and studied at the Trustee's Academy in Edinburgh under Sir William Allan and Thomas Duncan (painter).

In 1840, he was accepted as a student at the Royal Scottish Academy and first exhibited there in 1842, with the biblical painting, "The Child St John in the Wilderness".

[9] In about 1859 he began to paint a series of brooding Arthurian subjects, including several versions of La Mort d'Arthur, which depict a melancholy king on horseback, being led out of the frame to his death by a hooded Merlin, as well as Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.

Notable subjects include Andrew Carnegie, James G. Blaine, Lady Dufferin, Lord Dalhousie, Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, John Stuart Blackie, Sir Henry Irving, Edwin Arnold, and Daniel Macnee.

21 York Place in 2015
The Death of King Arthur , c. 1860