Venetian Dog, 2008 by Elizabeth Blackadder

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder was a Scottish painter and printmaker and was the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In 2001 she was also appointed Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland. She studied Fine Art at Edinburgh University, graduating with a first class degree and was awarded both a Carnegie Travelling Scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy and an Andrew Grant Postgraduate Scholarship by Edinburgh College of Art. She spent three months travelling through Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy where she focussed on classical and Byzantine art which she had studied at university. She developed her interest in still life and landscape painting while travelling in France, Spain, Portugal and Scotland and gained a reputation for painting flowers - an interest gained at school when dissecting and drawing plants as part of her botanical studies. She visited Japan several times and also travelled to the USA. She began working at Glasgow Print Studio in 1985 after being invited to make prints there. She worked with master printers from that time, producing etchings and screen prints and some lithographs and woodcuts. Her subject matter focussed on cats and flowers but also included images from travels in Europe and Japan.