Thomas Alexander Ferguson Graham

The post office directories from 1859 to 1901 list T. A. F. Graham at No. 9. The artist Thomas Alexander Ferguson Graham was born at Kirkwall, Orkney on 27 October 1840, son of Alexander Spiers Graham (1807-18…), Crown Chamberlain in Orkney, and Eliza Stirling. Sometime after their father’s death, Thomas and his only sister, Mary Anne, went to Edinburgh to live with their grandmother, Agnes Spears, at No. 9 Malta Terrace.

Tom Graham was enrolled as a student at the Trustees’ Academy on 9 January 1855, where he was a pupil of Robert Scott Lauder (1803-1869). Fellow students under Lauder included William McTaggart, William Quiller Orchardson, John Pettie, and George Paul Chalmers.

Graham first exhibited at the Scottish Academy in 1859 and continued to do so regularly from 1867, but in 1863 he joined his friends Orchardson and Pettie in London. With Mr C.E. Johnston, another Edinburgh-trained artist, the three shared a house in Fitzroy Square. Subsequently he occupied studios in Gloucester Road and Delancy Street, settling for good at 96 Fellows Road, South Hampstead.

From the age of twenty Graham undertook a series of trips abroad. As early as 1860 he went to Paris with McTaggart and Pettie, and two years later he paid the first of several visits to Brittany. In 1864 he was in Venice, and about 1885 he paid a prolonged visit to Morocco. However, the fishing villages of Fife, the Moray Firth, and the west coast of Scotland were perhaps his favourite sketching grounds.

In 1883 he was elected an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy. He died unmarried while on a visit to Edinburgh on 24 December 1906.

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