Born probably in 1777 in Ayrshire, Scotland, George Robertson traveled south to Derby about 1793 and started working there as a painter and designer while still in his teens. His marriage in 1798 to Ann Yates, a burnisher and daughter of the Derby painter and gilder John Yates, integrated him further into the decorative-painters community employed by the Derby Porcelain Factory (also called Derby China Works), founded by the important enameler and porcelain entrepreneur William Duesbury. The Yates family was also related to other members of Derby’s burgeoning creative class; Ann’s sister Sarah was married to John Wallis, the nephew of Sarah and Dr. Richard Wright, the elder brother of the famed painter Joseph Wright of Derby. Robertson became Derby’s most celebrated painter, reproducing complex landscapes and seascapes on ceramics. He left the Derby Porcelain Factory in 1820, practicing thereafter as an independent drawing master in Derby.¹

This well-preserved, small-format sketchbook demonstrates the creative process at work and the manner in which decorative painters worked in the early nineteenth century. A retailer’s label for Newman at 24 Soho Square, signed “George Robertson” in miniature script, was placed inside the cover, indicating that it was from James Newman, a pencil maker and colorman who was a leading retailer of drawing and painting materials in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.² The sketchbook containing forty-six sheets is complete and contains studies in a variety of media: graphite and ink drawings, and watercolors in brown and black monochrome and in color. It shows precisely how Robertson turned topographical views into painted vignettes on porcelain. This sketchbook, as well as another sketchbook by Robertson in the collection of the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, demonstrates how accomplished he was as a landscape painter.³

Robertson records in this sketchbook landscapes that he saw on his tour of mainland Scotland and the isles off its west coast. He clearly used it to gather source material for his work at the Derby Porcelain Factory, filling it with picturesque vignettes of landscapes suitable to be reproduced on decorative ceramics. Based on the varying orientation of the images on the pages, Robertson does not appear to have worked progressively from one end of the sketchbook to the other but alternated his use. Some sheets are split into three frames, with densely worked scenes in each; these landscapes were probably conceived specifically for the decorative field of a ceramic plate.⁴ Other studies are more naturalistic, such as the carefully observed drawings of foliage. Many are monochrome, but others have been worked in pencil and watercolor. A sequence of expressive landscapes in pencil, clearly worked en plein air, has scribbled color notations. At one end of the sketchbook, scenes are of exact locations: Dun Dornaigil, Dunvegan Castle, and Elgin Cathedral in northern Scotland; the ruins of St. Anthony’s Chapel, overlooking Edinburgh in the south; the circular stone tower of Dun Dornaigil and the small tidal island of Eilean Donan in the Scottish Highlands; Iona Abbey on the west coast; St. Oran’s Chapel on the Isle of Iona; the Old Breachacha Castle on the Isle of Coll; Kilchoman Old Parish Church on the island of Islay; the Sligachan Old Bridge on the Isle of Skye; and other views, including waterfalls, on the islands of Eilean Donan, Skye, Mull, and Coll. —Dena M. Woodall