Orrock, James, 1829-1913

James Orrock R.I., R.O.I. (1829 – 10 May 1913), was a prominent Scottish landscape painter, mostly in watercolour, collector and dealer of art and oriental ceramics, author and illustrator. He was also a dentist in Nottingham before 1866 when he moved to London to pursue an artistic career. He collected English paintings of the years around 1800, and was a great admirer and promoter of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. He was busy as an author and lecturer, becoming a well-known figure, promoting English painting and pushing for its better representation in public collections. As a painter he was a part of what has been called a "Cox school" within the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, following the traditions of David Cox and Peter De Wint; others in the group were Thomas Collier, E.M. Wimperis, and later Claude Hayes. They continued the broader and naturalistic approach of the earlier masters, rejecting Late Victorian grandiosity and over-precision. They also generally made less use of opaque bodycolour, though here Orrock's practice varied. He often used a good deal of underdrawing in pencil. His reputation remains clouded by his activities as an art dealer, especially over a number of works he sold as John Constables, which are now regarded as fakes. Since Orrock was a painter himself, it was rumoured at one time that he had painted them himself, but this is now not usually thought to have been the case. Whether he was aware that they were fakes, or had even commissioned them, seems now unknowable. The scale of his involvement with the art trade and with top collectors such as John Ruskin is clear in the two volume book about him by Byron Webber, published in London, by Chatto and Windus in 1903: James Orrock R.I., Painter, Connoisseur, Collector.