After a period at the Slade School in London, he studied in Paris under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre.

He taught landscape painting at the Glasgow School of Art, and assisted Francis Newbery with the life drawing classes.

His first one-man-show was organised in November 1894 at the gallery of Alexander Reid at 124 St Vincent Street in central Glasgow.

[2] After retiring from that post in 1925 he became Curator of the newly established Art Gallery in Kirkcaldy, where he died in December 1928.

He is buried in the Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh with his wife Amelie Robertson (1869-1942), whom he had married in 1890, and their daughter Mildred Bruce Tupman (d.1972).