That early landscape painting was not confined to England may be shown by reference to some Scotch and Irish artists. Alexander Runciman (1736–85) was born in Edinburgh. He began to paint landscapes before he was twelve. “Furnished with pencils, and brushes, and colours, he took to the fields; his first sketches were rocks, trees, and waterfalls.” At fourteen he was placed in the studio of John and Robert Norris where he showed himself “one of the wildest enthusiasts that ever devoted themselves to the art.” “Other artists,” it was said, “talked meat and drink, but Runciman talked landscape.” By 1755 Runciman set up as landscape painter on his own account, but he speedily learned that though landscape might bring applause it was not an art whereby even a moderate livelihood could be obtained and by 1760 the young painter had turned to other realms.[603] John Norris, of whom little is known except that he was Runciman’s teacher, was nevertheless in his day reckoned “a celebrated landscape painter.” Brydall says that he was “probably the first to create, or at least to minister to the taste for landscape in the Scottish metropolis.”[604] In Ireland was an obscure artist named Rogers who has been called “the father of landscape art” in that country. His pupil, Butts (d. 1764), painted early landscapes said to be “impressive copies of the wild scenes which abound in the county of Cork, and the romantic views that abound on the margin of Black Water.” From this catalogue of names and dates several facts emerge. In the first place, nearly all the landscape work mentioned belongs after 1740. From 1707 to about 1740 English landscape art can hardly be said to exist at all. Even the foreign artists so much in evidence in the preceding period are no longer to be found in England.[605] George II frankly hated “boetry and bainting” and the reigns before him were hardly more hospitably inclined to aesthetic claims outside the realms of portraiture and history painting. This lack of royal patronage would sufficiently account for the dearth of foreign painters, and perhaps, also, for the lack of English landscape painters. All native art-impulse would likewise feel the inevitably deadening effect of the universal and rigid acceptance of foreign canons of art. But whatever the cause, the fact remains that most of the English landscapes M. Rouquet speaks so enthusiastically of in 1755 must have been painted in the preceding fifteen years.