Details

Name

Donald Sinclair Swan

Brief Biography

1918-2004

Occupation

Artist

Description

Donald Swan was born in Glasgow, the son of Rev. John Arbuckle Swan, Minister of St David’s Ramshorn Kirk on Ingram Street. He attended Battlefield Primary School and Glasgow High School. Childhood holidays were spent in Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae.

In 1935, aged 16, Swan joined the Clan Line shipping company, transferring, in 1938, to the Royal Navy, in time for World War II. Sub-Lieutenant Swan saw active service in the North Atlantic and Western Approaches until he contracted tuberculosis in 1941. In Mearnskirk Hospital in Glasgow, Swan survived a spontaneous pneumothorax but his naval career was over.

Between 1942 and 1945, Swan attended Glasgow School of Art and then Hospitalfield art college in Arbroath. He studied portraiture under James Cowie and landscape painting with Mary Armour. In 1945 he was in London, attending life classes at various art schools; subjects in his sketch books include VE Day celebrations and the model/author Quentin Crisp.

Swan returned to the water in 1948 as the mate of a Thames barge and in 1949 as a deckhand on a Milford Haven trawler. Some powerful artwork resulted. Resuming his artist career, by 1952, he was an assistant to royal portrait painter James Gunn, but this promising phase ended when Swan returned to Glasgow to care for his ailing parents. Swan then headed for Cornwall and Penzance Art School where he met and married fellow student Elizabeth Lane.

Swan and Lane had both studied pottery at art school, Swan with Bernard and David Leach and Lane with Michael Leach. In 1966, the couple set up the Castle-an-Dinas Pottery at their home near Penzance.

In 1969, the centenary of the Cutty Sark, Swan mounted an exhibition of paintings of the clipper at different phases of its career, on board the ship itself at Greenwich, three of which remain in the Cutty Sark collection. Other maritime commissions followed, including the Mayflower, HMS Bounty and HMS Endeavour. His painting of the yacht Suhali was chosen by its owner, round the world yachtsman, Sir Robin Knox Johnson.

In 1972, Swan returned to Scotland with his family. He and Elizabeth set up the Isle of Cumbrae Pottery, selling on the island and exhibiting art pieces around Scotland. In the 1980s and 1990s, Swan’s history of his own family in portraits, ‘Time and a Family’, was exhibited at the University of Edinburgh, Netherbow Gallery in Edinburgh, The Garrison in Millport and Penlee House Gallery and Museum in Penzance. This exhibition touched a chord and was very warmly received by the public. In 1989 the Scottish National Portrait Gallery commissioned Swan to paint Professor Margaret Donaldson Salter.

Swan and Elizabeth returned to Cornwall in 2000, where Swan carried on painting until he was physically no longer able to do so. His last two portraits, of his nephew’s children, were dispatched to Canada just a month before his death in November 2004. Elizabeth also continued painting into old age. She died in 2021.