This artist was born in 1682, the son of William Aikman of Cairnie, Forfarshire, by his second wife, Margaret, sister of the first Sir John Clerk. In his youth he was possessed, as Douglas of the Baronage says, with even more than his customary solemnity, of a “mighty genius for portrait-painting.” His father, like so many of the Scottish gentry, was a member of the Scottish Bar, and desired that his son should enter upon the studies that would qualify him for the same profession—studies which would reasonably occupy his time, put him in the way of intellectual effort, and give him enough law to enable him to manage his estates profitably, and to sit with dignity and propriety upon the bench of county magistrates. But the parental wishes were in vain; the “mighty genius for portrait-painting” was not to be controlled. Aikman studied art for three years in Edinburgh, under Sir John de Medina, of whose portraiture there is a representative series in Penicuik House; and, when he came into possession of his ancestral acres, which were valuable then, and have become doubly valuable since, he promptly parted with them, sold all that he had for the sake of art; and having rid himself of the burden of ponderable and engrossing material things, started a free man to study painting in Rome. During the five years that he spent abroad he even visited Constantinople and Smyrna, a “far cry” indeed for a Scottish laird of the beginning of the seventeenth century. Returning to his native country in 1712, he was in time patronised by John, Duke of Argyll, and in 1723 he established himself in London, where he moved in the best and most cultured circles, numbering among his friends Sir Robert Walpole, Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay, several of whom still live upon his canvases. At the age of forty-nine he was prosperous and happy, in excellent practice as a portrait-painter, busied upon a great group of the Royal Family, commissioned by the Earl of Burlington, and now in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. But this work was destined never to be completed. His only son, one of those “bonnie bairns” to whom Allan Ramsay refers in his “Pastoral Farewell to Mr. Aikman,” a youth of great artistic promise—several etched studies after Van Dyck by his hand still exist to prove his talent[1]—sickened and died at the age of eighteen, and the father never recovered the blow. He pined away, died six months afterwards, 1731, and was buried in the same grave in the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, Edinburgh. Mallet wrote his epitaph; Ramsay, Thomson, and Somerville have recorded his virtues and the charm of his presence. [1] A three-quarters length portrait of the younger Aikman, with a grave earnest face, clad in a long-skirted grey coat, and holding a sketch in his hand, is in the possession of the representative of the family at The Ross, Hamilton. It is an excellent example of the elder Aikman’s portraiture.