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Checkers Artist John Burnet

Etching

Modern Restrike

• The artist was a Scottish painter and engraver, who was apprenticed as a young novice to the engraver, Robert Scott.
  
  
• Later John trained at the Trustees Academy under David Wilkie and then moved from Edinburgh to London in 1806, where he became established as a painter of portraits, landscapes and rural genre scenes that depicted daily activities and routine events of life.
  
  
• The seven commemorative oil sketches for a representation of the Battle of Trafalgar, dated 1835, were some of his best work.
  
  
• These artistic creations reveal a spontaneity and immediacy in the fluid handling of the brushstrokes, that was lacking in the final work on the same theme, painted as a pendant to Wilkie’s ‘Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch’ for the Duke of Wellington.
  
  
• Burnet developed strong skills as an engraver and created illustrations for some editions of Robert Burns’ poems and also the ‘Waverley’ novels of Sir Walter Scott.
  
  
• Working from a fine watercolour copy by S. P. Denning, John engraved the artist’s ‘Greenwich Pensioners’ painting.
  
  
• The scene depicted in his engraving ‘Playing at Draughts’ or checkers and created in a traditional triangular composition, showed a typical moment in a cheerful game of checkers between two men sitting in a courtyard; the possible winner wears a big grin as his opponent laments over the checkerboard and the female looks on in the background, also amused; the cozy scene was complemented by the dog lying at the man’s feet; the viewer’s attention was drawn to the man by a beam of sunlight highlighting the grinning checkers player and the game board.
  
  
• The Victorian engraving can now be recreated in a restrike etching that is printed from the original plates and then hand coloured by skilled artists to create a high quality print, as is seen in the copy above.
  
  
• Burnet combined his artistic talent with writing manuals and books on drawing, painting and other artists and his contribution to the arts was recognised with the award of a fellowship to the Royal Society.
  
  
• The gifted engraver retired from public life in 1860 some time after he completed the checkers engraving and died in Stoke Newington, London on April 29, 1868.

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