Erskine Nicol was born at Leith, Edinburgh in 1825. Overcoming strong opposition from his parents, he took all opportunities that came his way to pursue art, first taking an apprenticeship under a decorative house painter and at the aged of 12, becoming a student at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh, then under the stewardship of William Allan and Thomas Duncan. A spell back in Leith as a drawing instructor at a local school was followed by a period in Ireland (1846-50) as a teacher. He supplemented his stipend by painting portraits. He was in Dublin at the height of the Irish famine, and from that point, seems to have viewed himself as being as much Irish as Scottish. It was there that he found his metier, painting humorous character studies and genre scenes of the Irish working classes. These won him a degree of popularity, although today the idea of the Irish as mirthful country bumpkins sits less easily with modern sensibilities and Nicol was accused by some of making comic capital out of his subjects and of turning them into stereotypical ‘Paddies’. However, there is some truth in the charge that he did occasionally cater to the Victorian taste for low farce. More often than not, his work demonstrates a sympathetic and perceptive engagement with the injustices that plagued Ireland through the second half of the 19th century. Nicol established a studio on Clonave Island on Lough Derravaragh in County Westmeath in 1862. Works such as The Emigrants (1864) depicting a poor couple waiting in a railway station, is in the Tate Britain, and was one of the original works in Sir Henry Tate’s collection. His Wayside Prayer (1852) and Donnybrook Fair (1859) are also in the Tate. His An Ejected Family (1854; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) are among the most sympathetic portrayals of the time of the twin curses of emigration and forced eviction. His Paddy’s Mark is deemed inappropriate for show at Leeds. His Head or Harp? was certainly his most celebrated work and is a vivid evocation of the qualities which have come to be seen as central to the Irish character: the quicksilver wit; the love of entertainment and chance; the passion for music; and the respect (expressed in the choice of the ancient uilleann pipes as an instrument) for the antique customs and traditions of the country over modern flashiness. When these qualities were gifted by the playwright John Millington Synge to the hero of The Playboy of the Western World, their frank portrayal scandalised the conservative and anglicised middle classes of Dublin when the play premiered in 1907, and it is almost shocking to see them so robustly celebrated in Nicol’s painting, fifty years earlier. The painting is such a strikingly modern image, executed with such immediacy and enjoyment that the viewer can almost feel as if he or she is in the room, with two men who are separated from us by half a dozen generations. It is a vivid portrait of Irish rural life in the mid-nineteenth century, in which two men toss a coin for the price of a drink, seated across a table from one another in a country shebeen. A local man, his clay pipe in front of him, rubs his head in rueful resignation, as he realises that the wandering musician who is his opponent is an old hand at the game, and that he has been gulled. The musician seems to have snatched an opportunity at hand, and he is taking only brief pause from his trade: he has a squeezebox around his waist, and has draped his uilleann pipes over the back of his chair. In 1851 Nicol exhibited half a dozen such works at the Royal Scottish Academy, followed by a stream of others. He became an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1855 and an Academician in 1859.He settled in London in 1862 (though making yearly trips to Ireland), and exibiteed at the Royal Hibernian Academy. He was elected ARA in 1868. He continued to paint both Irish and Scottish subjects, exhibiting them at both the RA and the British Institution. He retired from the RA in 1885, and went back to Scotland. He later returned to England and settled at Feltham in Middlesex. He died there on 8 March 1904. Two of his sons – John Watson Nicol (1856-1926) and the much-travelled Erskine Edward Nicol (1868-1926) both became painters. In 1905 the Royal Scottish Academy held a commemorative exhibition of Nicol’s work, which may be found represented in a number of collections, including the British Museum, the V&A, the Tate, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Dundee Art Gallery, Glasgow Art Gallery, Ulster Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland.