In 1878, 47 years after the death of Patrick Nasmyth, a minor painter and truffler of artistic anecdotes named Richard Langley published a collection of painters’ lives. Among the figures gathered in Farewell to Life: Lyrical Reminiscences of British Peers in Art, was Nasmyth: “now a magical name to all refined and true lovers of art” and a landscapist who had not “been out-rivalled (if equalled) up to the present time by any who have followed him”.
Langley drew much of his information from one of Nasmyth’s oldest friends and staunchest collectors, William Harrison. But this was not reason alone that he went into raptures about “the beautiful finish, the felicitous pencilling, the flowing pellucid light, the exquisite harmony and truth to nature his genius conveyed into his works”. Nasmyth (1787-1831) may have been under-appreciated during his lifetime but posterity was making up for the neglect.
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