JAMES CASSIE, R.S.A.
Born, 1819; died, 1879.

James Cassie was one of the many artists whose simple and uneventful lives yield little of interest to chronicle beyond a few dates. He was born at Inverurie, and spent most of his life in Aberdeen, where he painted portraits, landscapes, and genre subjects. In the line of portraiture he possessed very considerable talent, and in the Trinity Hall of Aberdeen he is represented by three very good half-lengths, from the ability displayed in which he would have met with considerable success if he had continued to pursue that branch of art. He is, however, almost exclusively known as a landscape -painter, latterly confining his subjects to the sea and sea-shore, which he represented with breadth and simplicity, combined with sweetness of colour. He painted few large pictures : they were mostly as modest in size as in subject. He was happy with a bit of sea-shore, sand, and grey-green bent or grass, with an object in the foreground, under the soft shimmer of a summer haze, painted in a simple scheme of colour tender and grey in tone. He was elected an Associate of the Scottish Academy in 1869, and ten years later an Academician, in the year in which he died. Personally he was highly and deservedly esteemed, and regularly contributed many good pictures to the Academy's exhibitions, his Dumbarton Castle Sunset (1874) being one of the many very favourably noticed by the press. He spent the last years of his life in Edinburgh, where he is represented in the National Gallery by a small picture of Morning on the East Coast.