Hay, David Ramsay:

$2,000 · Offered by William Reese Company

THE PRINCIPLES OF BEAUTY IN COLOURING SYSTEMATIZED. An interesting treatise on color theory by the Scottish artist, interior decorator, and art theorist, David Ramsay Hay, outlining his unique and somewhat idiosyncratic views on color harmony. The volume includes fourteen handsome leaves of plates engraved by William Home Lizars, featuring eighty-six on-laid color samples designed by Hay. Born in Edinburgh, David Ramsay Hay (1798–1866) exhibited an early talent for drawing. His mother, Rebecca Carmichael, was a noted poet and friend of Robert Burns, but her husband's early death left the family penniless. Her brother, David Ramsay, a banker and proprietor of the Edinburgh Evening Courant, assumed responsibility for the education of his young namesake, who worked for a time as a "reading boy" in his uncle's printing office. At fourteen, he was apprenticed to Gavin Beugo, a heraldic and decorative painter in Edinburgh. It was then that Hay met his fellow apprentice and lifelong friend, painter David Roberts, to whom The Principles of Beauty in Colouring Systematized is dedicated. As partner in a successful interior decorating firm in Edinburgh, Hay was commissioned to help decorate Abbotsford for Sir Walter Scott and Holyrood Palace for Queen Victoria as well as both the National Gallery of Scotland and the hall of the Society of Arts, London. By the early 1840s, he had been appointed "decorative painter to Her Majesty, Edinburgh.""From the outset, Hay took an interest in the t

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