He was a prolific artist who travelled widely in Europe, India, Japan, the Middle East and America; however, he drew particular inspiration from the north-east coast of Scotland – a subject to which he returned throughout his life.

In partnership with the engraver William Ferguson, his father, David Allan, had built up a successful printing and publishing business that operated from Argyll Street in the centre of the city.

[8] Feeling the need for formal art training, Robert Allan took the bold step of moving to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian from 1875 to 1880.

[9] The Académie was welcoming of foreign students and was regarded as a stepping stone to the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where Allan trained under Alexandre Cabanel.

[14] Allan was using the spontaneity of the watercolour medium for a series of plein-air studies of coastal and market views that he sent back to English and Scottish exhibitions.

Mrs Bell recalls that 'The Scotch songs sung, the wild reels danced in Mr. Allan's studio, which sometimes alarmed the natives admitted to share in the revels, kept home memories alive.

[20] Through Allan, Melville was introduced to watercolour painting and the innovative technique – which critics would describe as 'blottesque'[21] – where blots and runs were used to suggest form.

During the summer vacation of 1879 Robert Allan revisited Scotland – an oil painting August in Fifeshire was selected for the Royal Academy the following year, and several watercolours such as Village of Crail[22] and Fishing Boats in a Harbour also date from this time.

Mrs Bell explains that, 'owing to a fortunate conjunction of circumstances', Robert Allan was the only artist who witnessed the interment of the writer Thomas Carlyle, on 10 February 1881 in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire.

He travelled widely in Europe, and brought back watercolours that often included recognisable locations such as the Doge's Palace, Venice; Notre-Dame, Paris; and Dutch canal views[30] while avoiding cliché.

[31] In 1883[32] Allan took a studio in Haverstock Hill, Hampstead,[33] and would make London his base for the rest his life – placing him in the centre of the British art world while also giving him access to Scotland through the rapidly developing railway routes.

In reviewing a SBA exhibition at Suffolk Street in 1883, the Dundee Advertiser singled out Robert Allan and Arthur Melville as Scottish artists 'of note'.

The Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours gave a 'nod to impressionism' by electing Robert Allan an associate in 1887 (and Arthur Melville in 1888).

'[37] The Queen's Jubilee Procession of 1887 is praised by Mrs Bell for 'the artist's bold brush-work, ... and his various Dutch scenes, notably his Lowlands of Holland [of c.1889], are perhaps especially remarkable for increased freedom of handling, and for the nearest approach made by their gifted author to what may be called the earlier phase of Impressionism.

Mrs. Bell's International Studio article draws on conversations with Allan in which he makes it clear that he 'was not, as is so often taken for granted, a member of the Glasgow School'.

[42] Inspired perhaps by the success of Arthur Melville's watercolour paintings of oriental subjects, in the winter of 1890–91 Allan embarked on a long trip to India with his friend the politician and temperance advocate William Sproston Caine, who was undertaking a political tour of that country.

The subjects were largely of the Aberdeenshire coast, such as Ford between North Uist and Benbecula exhibited at the RA in 1894 and purchased four years later by Aberdeen Corporation for £600.

Five watercolours from this visit were included in the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours exhibition in November 1907, when it was declared that Yameiman Gate, Nikko was 'fittingly placed as a centrepiece, for its merit justifies this.

She returned to her parents' home, but her plans to become a kindergarten teacher in Ithaca [59] were put aside, and in the following January she married Robert Allan in London and the couple were living at Buckingham Gate.

Perhaps preparing the ground for a forthcoming visit to his new in-laws, an illustrated article on Robert Allan's paintings, with an accompanying specially commissioned portrait of the artist, appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, published in Boston, in early 1913.

Records show Robert and Georgiana Allan returning from New York to Liverpool on the Cunard luxury liner RMS Lusitania on 6 March 1915.

The Syracuse Journal of 1 November 1920 notes that 'Robert Weir Allan, the eminent British artist, is spending a few days in the city at the home of [Georgiana's brother] Charles D. Trumbull.

[68] She was still in London the following year, when she attended a garden party in St James's Square held by the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

[72] The Westminster area, where Allan lived with a housekeeper and an unpaid servant, was subject to heavy bombing in the early years of the Second World War.