Dorothy JOHNSTONE (1892-1980) ✿

Dorothy Johnstone (1892–1980) was a Scottish painter and watercolourist. She was born in Edinburgh in 1892 and grew up in Napier Road, near the Gothic Mansion, Rockville. Her father, landscape artist George Whitton Johnstone RSA (1849–1901), encouraged her artistic talents, and at the age of 16 she enrolled as a student at the Edinburgh College of Art.

In 1924, at the peak of her artistic career, Johnstone mounted a joint exhibition in Edinburgh with fellow artist Cecile Walton. She married her colleague and fellow group member David Macbeth Sutherland in 1924. They had a son, Sir Iain Sutherland, in 1925, and a daughter in 1928.

 Rest Time in the Life Class (1923)

As a consequence of her husband's appointment in 1933 as head of Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen (now at Robert Gordon's University) and of the marriage bar in place at the time, she gave up her career and her students. She kept her links with Edinburgh by continuing to exhibit her portraits and landscapes at the Royal Scottish Academy, to which she was elected an Associate (ARSA) in 1962.

Johnstone painted landscapes and portraits, particularly of children, and her style was free and relaxed, whether using oil, watercolour, pencil or chalk. Some of her work is displayed at the National Gallery of Scotland. When she died in 1980, she bequeathed her important early painting 'Marguerites' (painted in 1912) to the Royal Scottish Academy.

Marguerites, 1912