The Beach at Douarnez, Brittany

Oil on canvas

50 x 65 cms
19 5/8 x 25 5/8 inches

Murray Urquhart was born in Kirkcudbright on 24th April 1880 and studied initially at the Edinburgh School of Art. He came to England and was admitted first to the Slade, then the Westminster School of Art where he studied under Walter Sickert before attending Frank Calderon`s School of Animal Painting. He later moved to Paris to study under the noted history painter Jean Paul Laurens at L`Académie Julian.

He is known as a figure, landscape, animal and marine painter in both oils and watercolours who was elected a full member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1914. He lived in Primrose Hill, London, between 1910 and 1914 when he moved to Newbury, then to Bridport in Dorset in 1919. He was back in London in 1925 but by 1928 had relocated to Meopham in Kent.

Urquhart exhibited two hundred and forty-four paintings in his life with 33 at the Lefevre Gallery, 16 at the Royal Academy, 4 at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts and 152 at the Royal Society of British Artists among others.

Sally Mitchell, writing about his horse painting, says of his work that it “…is of a free and direct style and is most sensitive, should not be overlooked.”