THOMSON, JOHN (1778-1840), amateur landscape painter—Thomson of Duddingston, as he is commonly styled,—was born on September 1, 1778, at Dailly, Ayrshire. His father, grandfather, and, as we are informed, great-grandfather also, were clergymen of the Church of Scotland. The father determined that his son should follow the ancestral profession, and, greatly against his natural bent,—for all his thoughts turned instinctively towards art,—he acceded to the parental wish. He studied in the university of Edinburgh; and, residing with his elder brother, Thomas Thomson, afterwards celebrated as an antiquarian and feudal lawyer, he made the acquaintance of Francis Jeffrey and other young members of the Scottish bar afterwards notable. The pursuit of art, however, was not abandoned; during the recess he sketched in the country, and, while attending his final college session, he studied for a month under Alexander Nasmyth. After his father's death he became, in 1800, his successor as minister of Dailly; and in 1805 he was translated to the parish of Duddingston, close to Edinburgh. The practice of art was now actively resumed, and it came to be continued throughout life—apparently without any very great detriment to pastoral duties. Thomson's popularity as a painter increased with his increasing artistic skill; and, having mastered his initial scruples against receiving artistic fees, on being offered £15 for a landscape—reassured by "Grecian" Williams's stout assertion that the work was "worth thrice the amount"—the minister of Duddingston began to dispose of the productions of his brush in the usual manner. In 1830 he was made an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy. Besides that of art, Thomson had other singularly varied tastes and aptitudes. He was an accomplished performer on violin and flute, an exact and well-read student of physical science, and one of the writers on optics in the early numbers of the Edinburgh Review. His life passed peacefully away in the kindly and charitable discharge of his clerical duties, varied by the enthusiastic pursuit of his art, and the enjoyment of intercourse with a singularly ​wide and eminent circle of friends, which, among artists, included Turner and Wilkie, and among men of letters Wilson and Scott,—the latter of whom desired that Thomson, instead of Turner, should have illustrated the collected edition of his works. He died at Duddingston on the 27th of October 1840 (not the 20th, as stated by some authorities). Thomson was twice married, and his second wife, the widow of Mr Dalrymple of Cleland, was herself also a skilful amateur artist.