Twilight at Samer

Born in Towie, Aberdeenshire, Thomson began work as an architect in Glasgow. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1882 and exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1886-1934. A close friend of Wilson Steer and George Clausen, in 1889 Thomson figured in the one and only exhibition of the London Impressionists at the Goupil Gallery, a group that included Sickert, who believed that the urban scenery of the capital was valid subject for Impressionist paintings. He became a member of the New English Art Club in 1891. Thomson worked as art critic for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Westminster Gazette and was lecturer in Perspective at the Slade School, 1895-1914; Head of the Art Department at Bedford College, London University, from 1899 until his retirement in 1914. From 1914 Thomson relocated to Samer in France where be bought Chateau Letoquoi, the house in which the French artist Jean Charles Cazin(1841-1901) had lived. A retrospective exhibition was held at Colnaghi’s in 1927. He died in 1939 at Boulogne, France. His 1897 oil painting of St Paul’s was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1920 and his watercolours Shop near Corfe Castle (1900) and Tile Works, Samer, Pas-de-Calais (1912) are now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.