Faed, Thomas, 1825-1900

Painter.

Thomas Faed, Scottish painter.

Thomas Faed was born in Kirkcudbright on 8 June 1826. He was the brother of the artists George Faed (1830-1852), John Faed (1819-1902), James Faed (1821-1911), and Susan Bell Faed (1827-1909). Thomas showed talent as a painter already as a boy but at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a draper in Castle Douglas. Painting was too strong however and he went to Edinburgh to work on miniatures for his brother. He entered the Trustees Academy at the Royal Scottish Academy, Mound, Edinburgh and was taught by Sir William Allan (1782-1850) and Thomas Duncan (1807-1845). At the age of eighteen he exhibited A scene from the 'Old English Baron' at the RSA. His greatest strength was the painting of scenes of rural and Scottish domestic life. In the 1840s he illustrated Scott's Heart of Midlothian . Between the 1850s and the 1890s he exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 1855 his The mitherless bairn received great acclaim and is now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. He is represented at the Tate, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Aberdeen, and Glasgow, and at Royal Holloway College, the Ashmolean, and in Montreal, Vancouver, Baroda, and Durban. Thomas Faed R.A. H.R.S.A. died in St. John's Wood, London, on 17 August 1900. His son John Francis Faed (1859-1904) was an accomplished oil and watercolour painter of seascapes.