# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Henderson, Joseph

​HENDERSON, JOSEPH (1832–1908), portrait and marine painter, born on 10 June 1832 at Stanley, Perthshire, was the third son—he had a younger twin brother—of a stone-carver, Joseph Henderson, by his wife, Marjory Slater. The family removing to Edinburgh, the father died there about 1840 in poor circumstances, and the four boys were sent to business at a very early age. Joseph was apprenticed to a firm of drapers in George Street, but he was allowed time to attend the classes of the Trustees' Academy in the mornings and evenings. On the recommendation of Alexander Handyside Ritchie [q. v.], sculptor, he was enrolled a student on 2 Feb. 1849. William Quiller Orchardson [q. v. Suppl. II] and Robert Herdman [q. v.] were fellow students. He left the academy on 10 May 1853, about a year after Robert Scott Lauder [q. v.] was appointed headmaster, and settled in Glasgow. From 1852 onward, Henderson supported himself entirely by his art. His early work bears the impress of the earlier Scottish tradition, as modified by Duncan and Thomas Faed [q. v. Suppl. I], rather than that of Lauder and his pupils, although evidences of Lauder's suggestion appear in Henderson's genre pictures such as 'The Ballad' (1858) and 'The Sick Child ' (1860). After spending some twenty years chiefly on pictures of that kind, Henderson, during a holiday on the Ayrshire coast about 1871, discovered that his real bent was sea-painting. Although he continued to paint portraits, he paid chief attention to the sea. At first figure incidents of considerable importance were usually introduced, and his colour inclined to be black and his handling hard; but gradually the figures became accessory to the effect, his colour gained in freshness and his brush work in freedom. His best work was done during the last fifteen years of his life. While his principal pictures were in oils, he painted in water-colour also, and was a member of the Royal Scottish Water-Colour Society. In celebration of his jubilee as a professional artist the Glasgow Art Club, besides entertaining him to dinner and presenting him with a souvenir, organised a special exhibition of his work (1901), and after his death the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, of which he was a vice-president, arranged a memorial exhibition. Between 1871 and 1886 he exhibited twenty pictures at the Royal Academy, but his chief pictures were usually shown at the ​Glasgow Institute. His art is represented in the Glasgow Gallery by an admirable sea-piece, ‘The Flowing Tide,’ and by full-length portraits of two lord provosts, and the collection of the Scottish Modern Arts Association contains his ‘Storm.’
He died at Ballantrae, Ayrshire, where for many years he had spent the summer, on 17 July 1908, and was buried in Sighthill cemetery, Glasgow.
Henderson married thrice: (1) in 1855, Helen, daughter of James Cosh, Buchanan, and by her (d. 1866) had four children, a daughter Marjory, who became second wife of William McTaggart, R.S.A., and three sons, all of whom became artists; (2) in 1869, Helen Young of Strathaven (d. 1871), by whom he had one daughter; and (3) in 1872, Eliza Thomson, who survived him with two daughters.
There are admirable portraits of him by his son John (in the artist's possession) and by William McTaggart (in his widow's possession). John Mossman executed a double medallion of him and his third wife.
[Private information; Scots Pictorial, 15 Jan. 1901; International Studio, 1902, xvi. 207; Glasgow Herald, 18 July 1908; exhibition catalogues; Percy Bate, The Art of Joseph Henderson, 1908; J. L. Caw, Scottish Painting, 1908.]
J. L. C.