Cioch Na N'oiche

Artist, John Maclauchlan Milne was born in Buckhaven, Fife in August 1885 and raised in Edinburgh, the son of landscape painter Joseph Milne. With his parents and siblings, he returned to Scotland, after living in Canada and then London, and settled in Dundee in 1908. He married in 1911 and lived in Kingoodie, on the north shore of the Firth of Tay, and then at several Dundee addresses. He joined the Royal Flying Corps in January 1917 and served in northern France and Belgium during the First World War. 

After the war he returned to Dundee to resume his career. He was painting in Paris and the Loire Valley in 1920/21. His studio in Dundee was at 132a Nethergate from about 1920 until 1940. In 1924 he went to the Côte d’Azur in France and painted at Cassis. In subsequent years in the 1920s he painted all along this coast from L’Estaque, west of Marseilles, to St Paul de Vence, near Nice. St Tropez was a favourite location of many of his paintings. 

In the early 1930s, he painted in Perthshire and the Scottish Central and North-west Highlands. He visited the Island of Iona (1937, ’38 and ’39). In 1940 he left Dundee for the Island of Arran where he lived until near the end of his life in October 1957. He exhibited regularly at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Glasgow Institute for the Fine Arts and, for a period, with the Society of Scottish Artists and elsewhere. There are 37 of his works in public collections.

He is claimed as ‘The Dundee Colourist’ and by others as ‘The Fifth Scottish Colourist’.

from ‘The Missing Colourist – the search for John Maclauchlan Milne, RSA’ by Maurice Millar.