John Ronald Craigie Aitchison was born in Edinburgh on 13 January 1926. He was the son of barrister Craigie Mason Aitchison, KC, later the first socialist Lord Advocate for Scotland. Craigie did not enjoy the relentlessly hearty environment of Loretto School, and when his father died, he used it as an excuse to quit that establishment. Thereafter, he was educated at home by a governess. Aitchison managed to avoid military service during the Second World War, due to the opinion of a Morningside medic.  He spent four years training for the law, two in Edinburgh, followed by two at the Middle Temple in London. For much of that time, he observed murder trials at the Old Bailey, but failed his exams. In his spare time, he became a regular visitor to the Tate, where he copied works of art. In 1952 he enrolled at the Slade, where he studied under William Coldstream and Robert Medley, along with Michael Andrews, Paula Rego, Myles Murphy and Euan Uglow, with whom he became lifelong friends. Aitchison later recalled: ‘I was told by two visiting tutors, Victor Pasmore and John Piper, just to give it up.’ In 1954 he was one of ‘Six Young Contemporaries’ featured in a Gimpel Fils exhibition. The following year, was awarded a British Council Scholarship to study in Italy. His early palette was muted, and it was his visit to Italy which stimulated his interest in more vivid hues. Aitchison used the scholarship to buy a London taxi, which had no reverse and had to be driven through the Alps in first gear. It finally expired in Rome and Murphy and Aitchison were helped by a Vatican cleric, who put them up in the palace and eventually stored the taxi in the Vatican basement. Aitchison was bowled over by the masters of the Quattrocento – Giotto, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, whose frescoes in Arezzo remained his favourite paintings. After leaving the Slade, Aitchison returned to Scotland; but in 1963, he and his mother moved to London, buying a house in Kennington. Aitchison’s first one-man show took place in 1959 at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London, where he was given two further one-man shows in 1960 and 1964. For half a century, Aitchison drew on the same small repertoire of images: crucifixions, Italian landscapes, portraits of black men and pictures of dogs, usually Bedlington Terriers. Unsurprisingly, he had few imitators. A major retrospective of his work from 1953 was held at the Serpentine Gallery in 1981, with further retrospectives at Harewood House near Leeds (1994) and the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow (1996). Aitchison and Uglow were close friends, Uglow giving Aitchison the easel at which he painted and Aitchison served as Uglow’s best man at his wedding. Their mothers, too, became good friends and, after Lady Aitchison’s death in 1970, her son became almost part of the Uglow family, spending Christmas with them every year in South Norwood. The two were finalists in the first £30,000 Jerwood Painting Prize, sponsored by The Sunday Telegraph in 1994. Aitchison won, but claimed that ‘the organisers muddled us up.’ After Uglow’s death in 2000, Aitchison curated an affectionate retrospective of his work at the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath. Aitchison taught part-time at the Chelsea Art School from 1968 to 1984. He was elected ARA in 1978, RA in 1988 and appointed CBE in 1999. Brian Sewell, art critic of the London Evening Standard panned his work, describing Aitchison as ‘a painter of too considered trifles.’ Other critics tended to dismiss his work as the sort of thing a 10-year old might do. At first glance, Aitchison’s paintings could appear childlike, but it was precisely that quality of innocent spontaneity that admirers so admired – as seen, for example, in Wayney Going to Heaven, in which one of his beloved Bedlington terriers floats skywards under a new moon. In person, Aitchison was an innocent abroad. A gentle and whiskery man with a halo of snowy hair and a look of permanent astonishment, he was engagingly other-worldly and blissfully ignorant of contemporary culture. When he was informed by a friend that one of his paintings had been bought by Sir Elton John, Aitchison had to ask who this person might be. Although the Tate owned four of his works, he had no time at all for what he called ‘the kind of shocking rubbish that appears in the Turner Prize’ and was happier at the RA, which held a major and well-attended retrospective of his works in 2003. Aitchison died of cancer on 21 December 2009.