Daniel Macnee
1806–1882 · Scottish portrait painter, president of the Royal Scottish Academy
Sir Daniel Macnee (Fintry, Stirlingshire, 1806 - Edinburgh, 1882) was a Scottish portrait painter who became president of the Royal Scottish Academy. His career, spent mainly in Glasgow and Edinburgh, places him among the notable portraitists of nineteenth-century Scottish painting.
As a boy he was apprenticed to the landscape artist and watercolourist John Knox, alongside Horatio McCulloch. After working as a lithographer and decorating the lids of snuff boxes in Cumnock, he studied at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, where he earned his living illustrating publications. He then settled in Glasgow as a fashionable portrait painter and joined the Royal Scottish Academy in 1829.
Following the death of Sir George Harvey in 1876, he was elected president of the institution and was knighted. From then until his death he lived in Edinburgh, where he was valued for his sociable manner and his humorous Scottish stories. His works are held by the National Portrait Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. He was the great-grandfather of the actor Patrick Macnee.