John Graham

John Graham (c. 17541 November 1817) was an 18th-century Scottish painter and teacher of art.

Life Richard Suett as Bayes in The Rehearsal by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1796, Victoria and Albert Museum). Graham was born in Edinburgh and apprenticed to a coach-painter in Edinburgh, George MacFarquhar. He next moved to London and became a coach-painter. He started studying at the Royal Academy Schools and exhibited there between 1780 and 1797. Graham also painted an Othello and Desdemona for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery.

Graham was nominated four times between 1793 and 1797 for associate membership to the Royal Academy, but failed to win election. Duncan Thomson, in his article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, paraphrases Joseph Farington, who told Thomas Lawrence, that "Graham was a candidate he would certainly not vote for, in what he considered a very weak field." In 1859, the Royal Scottish Academy bought his The Disobedient Prophet, writing of Graham that he was a "Master to whom Scottish Art had been considerably indebted". and Alderman John Boydell. He also painted animal pictures, such as the series of lion and tiger paintings he made of the menagerie in the Tower of London.

Graham died at his home "after a severe and lingering illness" on 1 November 1817.

Works Daniel in the lions' den (1780) Una (1783) Ceres in Search of Proserpine (1786) The Escape of Mary, Queen of Scots, from Lochleven Castle, presented by Alderman Boydell with a portrait of himself, also of Graham, at Stationers' Hall Mary, the Morning before her Execution (1792) King David instructing Salomon (1797) The Funeral of General Fraser at Saratoga The Disobedient Prophet, National Gallery of Scotland