MANSON, George (1850-1876), a Scottish watercolour painter, was born in Edinburgh on the 3d of December 1850. When about fifteen he was apprenticed as a woodcutter with Messrs W. & R. Chambers, with whom he remained for over five years, designing and engraving vignettes distinguished by singular rightness and directness of technical method, diligently employing all his spare time in the study and practice of art, and producing in his morning and evening hours water-colours of much delicacy and beauty, like the Milking Time and the Cottage Door. In 1871 he left the Messrs Chambers, and devoted himself exclusively to painting. His subjects were derived from humble Scottish life—especially child life, varied occasionally by portraiture, by landscape, and by views of picturesque architecture. In 1873 he visited Normandy, Belgium, and Holland; in the following year he spent several months in Sark; and in 1875 he resided at St Lo, and in Paris, where he mastered the processes of etching. He afterwards produced a series of plates which promised excellence in the art. Meanwhile in his water-colour work he had been adding more of breadth and power to the tenderness and richness of colour which distinguished his early pictures, and he was planning more complex and important subjects. But his health had been gradually failing, and he was ordered to Lympstone in Devonshire, where he died on the 27th of February 1876. Among his chief productions are the High School Wynd; the Companions—a gipsy girl and her donkey; Waiting for the Boats; What is It Ί — a child examining an antique clock; and his own portrait as a Sark fisherman. Since his death several exhibitions of his works have been held in London and Edinburgh, and a volume of photographs from his water-colours and ...