Monument to Alexander Nasmyth

One of the kindest letters my mother received after her great loss was one from Sir David Wilkie. It was dated 18th April 1840. "I hasten," he said, "to assure you of my most sincere condolence on your severe affliction, feeling that I can sympathise in the privation you suffer from losing one who was my earliest professional friend, whose art I at all times admired, and whose society and conversation was perhaps the most agreeable that I ever met with. " He was the founder of the Landscape Painting School of Scotland, and by his taste and talent has for many years taken a lead in the patriotic aim of enriching his native land with the representations of her romantic scenery; and, as the friend and contemporary of Ramsay, of Gavin Hamilton, and the Runcimans, may be said to have been the last remaining link that unites the present with the early dawn of the Scottish School of Art." I may add that my mother died six years later, in 1846, at the same age as my father, namely eighty-two.