John Duncan (painter)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (November 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

John Duncan was born in Dundee, Scotland in the year 1866. His father was a cattleman, but John had always showed both a disinterest in the family business and a propensity for visual art, so much that by the age of 11 he was already a prolific student at the Dundee School of Art. Called a madman by some and a mystic by others, Duncan admitted to hearing "faerie music" whilst he painted. Although his work remains strongly rooted in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, there is a certain graphical quality which sets it apart from his contemporaries and likens it to Art Nouveau, while the subject matter is thoroughly Celtic Revival-- he is generally referred to as a "symbolist" by art critics. His dreamy, mystical nature led him to fall in love with a woman whom he believed to have discovered the Holy Grail in a well in Glastonbury and who later divorced him. He never remarried and died in 1945.