Rare 126-year-old painting by Scots artist expected to fetch £150,000 at auction

dailyrecord.co.uk:

A rare 126-year-old painting by a Scots artist who tragically died in a train crash at 32 is expected to fetch as much as £150,000 at auction.The painting titled Sweet Violets is regarded as Robert Brough's 'masterpiece' and will go under the hammer on Thursday, June 8, at Lyon & Turnbull.Talented Brough had a great career trajectory and it was said he would have been regarded as one of the greatest in the history of Scottish art if he did not meet his untimely death in 1905.Brough, raised on a farm near Aberdeen, was travelling to London in 1905 when his train was involved in a crash.

He died after suffering severe burns, Aberdeen Live reports. He created Sweet Violets in 1897 while still in his mid-twenties after spotting Barbara Staples, then 18, on the city's Union Street and asking her father permission to paint her.

In the painting, she is holding a jar of violets and clad in the fashionable dress of the day. Scottish Field writes that the piece is widely considered to be regarded as his masterpiece, and has only been displayed once at Aberdeen Art Gallery in 1995.

Brough was brought up by a single mother who was a lady’s maid to the Duchess of Hamilton and his artist talent was spotted by neighbour and fellow artist George Reid, who later became president of the Royal Scottish Academy.Brough went on from Ruthrieston School to study evening classes at Gray's School of Art while working as an apprentice engraver with Andrew Gibb & Co.He met American artist, John Singer Sargent, early in the twentieth century at Chelsea Arts Club and the leader portrait painted of the era soon became his mentor.Sargent rushed to his bedside after the train crash and was with his protégé when he died two days after the tragedy in a