James Duncan

James Duncan (4 April 1834 — 12 August 1905) was a Scottish sugar refiner and businessman, who then became a philanthropist and art collector. His house and grounds on the Cowal peninsula in Argyll became Benmore Botanic Garden, now managed by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Biography Duncan was born on 4 April 1834 in Springburn, Lanarkshire. He was the son of a successful Glasgow bookseller. a method which he then patented. Between 1858 and 1861, Duncan was a partner of the Greenock sugar refinery Duncan, Bell & Scott.

In the mid-1860s, Duncan developed the Clyde Wharf Refinery in Silvertown, London, Duncan constantly refined the process and learned different applications to keep Clyde Wharf at the top of the industry. At the peak of the business, Clyde Wharf was producing up to two thousand tons of sugar per week.

In 1878, Duncan was elected Fellow of the Society of Chemical Industry, later becoming its vice president. By 1879, he held the post of Chairman of the Sugar Refiners' Committee, Duncan is buried in the churchyard at Kilmun, Argyll under a pink granite slab on a high part of the steep graveyard with a view looking across the Holy Loch. A memorial obelisk to Duncan designed by Archibald McFarlane Shannan was erected in 1906 at Graham's Point in Kilmun.

Philanthropy Duncan's charitable work was widely known throughout Britain. He gave twenty per cent of his annual £100,000 salary to a range of causes, making him one of the most committed philanthropists of the time.

Duncan was known as a major collector of fine art and was also a lender of pictures to annual exhibitions, including the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. In 1878, he was elected the institute's vice president. He regularly contributed works to European exhibitions, including to the Paris Salon, and to key international exhibitions of art and industry in France and Germany in the 1870s and 1880s. He then commissioned the construction of a large gallery building to showcase his large collection of fine arts along with a fernery and one of the largest greenhouses in Scotland.

The estates amounted to 12,260 acres of land. Duncan made extensive improvements to the land, on some of which he kept West Highland cattle and Scottish Blackface sheep. The sheep were first seen at the Paris International Exhibition of 1878. His flock of sheep gained awards at the annual exhibitions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland. Duncan also had over six million trees planted as part of the large landscape alterations he had designed, including commissioning features such as the 'Golden Gates', which were earlier shown at the Paris International Exhibition.

Following the introduction of sugar imports from Germany, Duncan suffered a massive loss of fortune and had to sell the estate in 1889. Benmore House was acquired by the Younger family and later gifted to Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. It is now the Benmore Botanic Garden.

Duncan's art collection at Benmore was split up and sold and the paintings are now housed in museums around the world, including the Louvre, the Belvedere in Vienna, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The latter is home to four works from Duncan's collection.