James Bisset (artist)

1762 – 17 August 1832) was a Scottish-born artist, manufacturer, writer, collector, art dealer and poet, who spent most of his life in and around Birmingham, England.

[1] At the age of 15 Bisset obtained an apprenticeship with a Birmingham japanner, and by 1785 was listed in a local trade directory as a painter of miniatures.

[2] His invention of a method of painting on the inside of convex glasses enabled him to develop a successful business making ornamental goods and marry the daughter of a local landowner, and the early years of the nineteenth century saw him diversifying into medal-production and art dealing.

[3] In 1808 Bisset moved to a large house in New Street where he established a museum and picture gallery – Birmingham's first – that displayed everything from paintings and medals to stuffed wildlife and "works of savage nations".

[2] His most notable work is his 1800 Poetic survey round Birmingham, with a brief description of the different curiosities and manufactures of the place, accompanied with a magnificent directory, with the names and professions, &c. superbly engraved in emblematic plates – a directory of Birmingham trades at the time of the town's revolutionary industrial expansion, written in heroic verse and intended as a "grand tour" of the "works of genius" of a "seat of the arts".