page_title: Robert Weir Allan
section_title: Young India
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Weir Allan / Young India
caption_attribution_description: English: This drawing was reproduced in the book Young India in 1891
context_page_description: Robert Weir Allan was a Scottish-born painter known mainly for his depiction of landscape and marine subjects. He was born in Glasgow into a family that encouraged and valued his natural artistic ability. He exhibited at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts when aged 22, and two years later he had a painting selected for the Royal Academy, in London. In 1875–80 he attended the Académie Julian in Paris, and he was influenced by the French school of rustic naturalism and also by French Impressionism. Working plein-air, he developed a loose, painterly approach to landscape subjects. He was a prolific artist who travelled widely in Europe, India, Japan, the Middle East and America; however, he drew particular inspiration from the north-east coast of Scotland – a subject to which he returned throughout his life. He exhibited extensively in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and became vice-president of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. He was equally at home with oil painting, and during his lifetime he had 84 paintings selected for exhibition at the Royal Academy. For the last 60 years of his life his home was in London, and he died there at the age of 90 in 1942.
context_section_description: Inspired perhaps by the success of Arthur Melville's watercolour paintings of oriental subjects, in the winter of 1890–91 Allan embarked on a long trip to India with his friend the politician and temperance advocate William Sproston Caine, who was undertaking a political tour of that country. Allan had been invited to contribute watercolour illustrations for a publication that would be entitled 'Young India'. On return, he exhibited the watercolours Service in a Sikh Temple, The Street in Delhi, The Water Carriers of Gwalior and Oudeypore at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours winter exhibition. The Glasgow Herald considered that 'Mr. Robert W. Allan's work is as strong as it has ever been, and more brilliant in colour … there is nothing more to be said than that even Mr Allan has never done better work.' Oudeypore was worked up as an oil painting and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1892. By this time Allan was living at 2 Spenser Street, Victoria.
caption: 'Mr R.W. Allan and his sketching-cart', published in Young India in 1891
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