Born at Loanhead-of-Guthrie, in Forfarshire (now Angus), Arthur Melville was one of the most important Scottish Orientalist painters and finest watercolourists of his period. He trained in Edinburgh under the Scottish genre painter James Campbell Noble (1845–1913) and at the Royal Scottish Academy before moving to France in 1878 and attending the Académie Julian in Paris (Bénézit, 2006, p. 743). He spent the following two years mostly in France, working at Granville and Cancale, and in 1879, at Grez-sur-Loing, the bourgeoning artists' colony five miles south of Fontainebleau, while in 1880 he called at Honfleur, probably on his return to Scotland (McConkey & Topsfield, 2015, pp. 11–12).
Melville was a great traveller: early in 1881, he set sail for Egypt and, on arriving in Cairo, he stayed at the luxurious Shepheard's Hotel. He made a trip to the pyramids of Giza for a week in May, not only to assist the English Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) in measuring the ancient structures, but also to paint Egypt's pharaonic legacy (McConkey & Topsfield, 2015, p. 41).
In February 1882, Melville left Cairo, and took the train to Suez. Afterwards, he travelled by steamer to Jeddah and Aden arriving in Karachi on 29 March. He continued his travels through the Gulf of Persia to Baghdad, via Muscat, Jask, Bandar Abbas, Burshehr, and the River Tigris, before returning overland to Constantinople. The journey from Cairo to Constantinople lasted eighteen months and had a strong impact on Melville's entire artistic output (McConkey & Topsfield, 2015, p. 125; National Galleries Scotland, 2020a).
Between 1890 and 1893, Melville visited Spain and North Africa. His journey began in the Moroccan port city of Tangier and led to Spain, where he visited Ronda, Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Toledo and Madrid. In the latter city, he copied the works of Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) in the Prado Museum. In 1892, Melville returned to the Iberian Peninsula and visited northern Spain, together with the Welsh painter Frank Brangwyn (1867–1956). Thanks to Brangwyn’s account of their journey together, and additional material from Melville’s own journal, the travels of the Scottish painter in 1892 are well recorded. In 1894 Melville made the first of at least two trips to Venice (McConkey & Topsfield, 2015, p. 85).
The resulting sketches from Melville’s trips to the Middle East provided the material for a significant number of his watercolours and paintings throughout the 1880s and 1890s (National Galleries Scotland, 2020a). He developed a unique technique of watercolour painting, described as 'blottesque', using dabs of pigment on wet paper that he then blotted with a sponge. He often tried out the effect of spots of different colours by applying them to glass and placing the glass over the painting before applying the colour to the surface of the paper (McConkey & Topsfield, 2015, pp. 9, 11). The colours of his brilliant paintings were later referred to as the result of a 'stained glass' palette (McConkey & Topsfield, 2015, pp. 7, 25).
Melville was furthermore associated with the 'Glasgow Boys', a loose grouping of young artists who represent the beginnings of modernism in Scottish painting and were influenced by the Naturalist paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884) and the tonal painting of the American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) (National Galleries Scotland, 2020b).
Melville was made an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1886 and a member of the Royal Society in Watercolours and the Royal Society of Scottish Painters in Watercolours. He exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1878 and 1896, as well as the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, New Water-Colour Society and the Grosvenor Gallery (Bénézit, 2006, p. 743). He was awarded a gold medal in 1891 at the Munich Glaspalast exhibition, where he presented twenty-two works (McConkey & Topsfield, 2015, p. 126).

Bénézit, E. (ed.) (2006). Melville, Arthur. In Dictionary of artists (Vol. 9, pp. 743–744). Paris: Gründ.

McConkey, K., & Topsfield, Ch. (2015). Arthur Melville. Adventures in colour. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland.

National Galleries Scotland (2020a). Arthur Melville. Retrieved August 5, 2020 from the website of the museum https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/arthur-melville

National Galleries Scotland (2020b). The Glasgow Boys. Retrieved August 5, 2020 from the website of the museum https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/glasgow-boys