Arthur Melville (1855–1904) was a Scottish painter of Orientalist subjects, among others. Early life and art education Arthur Melville was born in Loanhead-of-Guthrie, Forfarshire (now Angus, Scotland) on 10 April 1855. The family moved to East Linton, Haddingtonshire (now East Lothian), around the 1860s. He took up painting while working as a grocer's apprentice and he attended evening art classes in Edinburgh - his biographer (Agnes E. Mackay who was his niece) indicated that he often walked the eight miles there and back. In 1874 he was employed as a bookkeeper in Dalkeith. He became a fulltime student at the Royal Scottish Academy School under John Campbell Noble. He was also influenced by John Robertson Reid. In 1877 he had, at the age of 22, his painting A Cabbage Garden, accepted by the Royal Academy. Melville sold the painting to James Hunter Annandale, a Lasswade paper manufacturer, and this partially financed the artist's studies in Paris from 1878 to 1880. in 1878 he travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Atelier Julian (Académie Julian). Here he began to learn about the intricacies of watercolour painting although his niece writes that he spent much time admiring the work of other artists - she mentions Monet's Les Didons Blancs as an influence with its movement, colour and light. He had met a Scottish artist, Robert Weir Allan, who had introduced him to the Impressionists. He then spent the summer of 1879 in Grez-sur-Loing. At Grez-sur-Loing a number of artists gathered and they were en plain air adherents, many being followers of Jules Bastien-Lepage. As well as Grez-sur-Loing, Melville visited Granville, Honfleur. He seemed keen to find peasant models who would pose en plein air following in the footsteps of the work of French rural Naturalists. He returned to Edinburgh early in the summer of 1880 and he took a studio in Shandwick Place which he shared with his brother George, a medical student. He only stayed a few months as he intended to return to France and then to travel to the Middle East. Travels The colour-sense which is so notable a feature of Melville's work developed during his travels in Persia, Egypt and Turkey between 1880 and 1882, where he sometimes travelled alone on long inland journeys. To convey strong Middle Eastern light, he developed a technique of using watercolour on a base of wet paper with gouache applied to it.