Thomas Millie Dow

Deciding against a career in law, Dow went to Paris in 1877 and enrolled for classes at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme.

The subjects of his compositions range from the intense stillness of woodland to the calm before a storm at sea; and from dusk deepening on a northern shore to the lifting haze of a Mediterranean spring morning.

From 1877 to 1879 Dow spent the winters in the Paris studios and making occasional sketching excursions with fellow students Mann, Paterson, and Bell, to the villages of Barbizon and Grez-sur-Loing in the Forest of Fontainebleau.

Summers were spent painting in the towns and villages along the east coast of Scotland, travelling from Dysart through St Andrews and on up to Stonehaven, Cullen, Cowie, Collieston and Forvie Ness.

Dow traveled out of the city, south to Moniaive, for his first allegorical painting The Coming of Spring, and north for his study of birches, In a Wood at Forres, which was bought by Alexander Mann.

He had begun a series of commissions, the first being Portrait of John Nairn (Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery) and writes of working on a likeness in pastels of his sister Mary Lady in Black (private collection).

Dow was at this time sharing the Glasgow studio of William York Macgregor and living with Mary and her husband Allan McLean, the lawyer, amateur painter and art collector.

Dow is among the 21 Glasgow-based artists whose work is assessed in David Martin's contemporary account entitled The Glasgow School of Painting (George Bell & Sons 1897).

"His perception of colour is similar to his use of paint – keen and refined; and his observation of nature such as to give a true feeling of form, without a slavish imitation."

And he draws attention to what others have found since in Dow's work, that is, his "faculty of placing on canvas the essence of the abstract qualities of his subject, with a fine decorative arrangement of line and colour masses, and, let the theme be an idyllic landscape or an imaginative figure-subject, he combines in a satisfactory result the ideal with the real".

[4] Though the Glasgow School grouping was "geographical in nature rather than stylistic" as Paul Harris makes clear in his introduction to the 1976 edition of Martin's account, it was to gain them a wider audience.