JAMESON, GEORGE, an eminent artist, the Vandyck of Scotland, was the son of Andrew Jameson, an architect, and born at Aberdeen in 1586. He studied under
Rubens at Antwerp; and, after his return, applied with indefatigable industry to portraits in oil, though he sometimes practised in miniature, and also in history and landscape. His largest portraits were generally somewhat less than life. His earliest works are chiefly on boards, but he afterwards painted on a fine linen cloth, smoothly primed with a proper tone, to help the harmony of his shadows. His excellence is said to consist in delicacy and softness, with a clear and beautiful colouring; his shades are not charged, but helped by varnish, with little appearance of the pencil. When King Charles I. visited Scotland in 1633, the magistrates of Edinburgh, knowing his majesty's taste, employed Jameson to make drawings of the Scottish monarchs, with which the king was so pleased, that he sat to him for a full-length picture, and rewarded him with a diamond ring from his own finger. Jameson always drew himself with his hat on, either in imitation of his master Rubens, or from having been indulged in that liberty by the king when his majesty sat to him. Some of Jameson's works are in the colleges of Aberdeen; and the Sibyls there he is said to have drawn from living beauties in that city. But the greatest collection is that at Taymouth, the seat of the Marquis of Breadalbane; Sir John Campbell of Glenorchy, ancestor of the noble marquis, having been the chief patron of Jameson, who, in fact, attended him in his travels. This artist died at Edinburgh, and was interred in the Greyfriars church-yard, but without a monument. Jameson was but little known in England, and has not been noticed by any English writer on the fine arts, except Lord Orford. But he was much esteemed in his own country; and Arthur Johnston, the poet, addressed to him an elegant Latin epigram on his portrait of the Marchioness of Huntley.