Robert Walker Macbeth

Robert Walker Macbeth (30 September 1848 – 1 November 1910) was a Scottish painter, etcher and watercolourist. His father was a portrait painter named Norman Macbeth and his niece Ann Macbeth. Two of his five brothers, James Macbeth (1847–1891) and Henry Macbeth, later Macbeth-Raeburn (1860–1947), were also artists.

He was a member, very late in the day, of the Idyllic school, and was important in bringing their works to a wider public through his reproductions in etching, often made several decades after the original work. His works were varied, and his style evolved, but not necessarily improved, over his career, as conventional sentimentality took over many paintings from the 1890s onwards.

He sometimes engraved his own paintings, as well as those by others. When he exhibited his painting The Ferry Inn at the Royal Academy in 1882, the critic of the Times described him (by then in his late 30s) as “a young artist whose work is but imperfectly appreciated, but who is pressing steadily forward in his own way, but on somewhat similar lines to the late Fred Walker.”