William Alister Macdonald

Watercolours from Thurso, the Thames, and Tahiti
The first biography of Scottish watercolourist W. Alister Macdonald (1861-1956), regarded as a ‘Tahitian Turner’ (Bunster 1956), reveals romance, tragedy, escapism and a long-overdue reappraisal of his European and Polynesian work.
The life of Scottish watercolourist William Alister Macdonald (1861-1956) contained more mystery and intrigue than a novel by the authors he knew as friends. Mid-life in the early 1900s he painted widely across Britain, Europe and North Africa. Aged sixty, abandoning his wife and son in London, he settled in Tahiti, where he befriended authors Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall and Zane Grey. Critical acclaim of his work peaked in 1935 with the discovery of over 120 watercolours capturing London streets and lost panoramas from the Thames, its river life and trade at the turn of the last century, now part of the Wakefield Collection at London’s Guildhall. Yet in Tahiti his reputation has endured with appreciation of his timeless, exquisite landscapes and studies of paradise. This first fully illustrated biography of Macdonald’s life provides a long-overdue opportunity for his European and Polynesian work to be reappraised and his story told.

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