Francis Dennis Ramsay

Francis Dennis Ramsay (15 March 1925 – 8 February 2009), known as Dennis Ramsay, was a Scottish portrait painter, trained in London and Paris, who worked mainly in Australia in the classical tradition.

A painter in the classical tradition, Ramsay was born in London of Scottish descent. He was related to the Scottish artists Allan Ramsay (1713–1784) and James Ramsay (1759–1854). Towards the end of World War II, he served in the RAF, and in 1952 he made a model of the State Coach which was, exceptionally, accepted by HM Queen Elizabeth II. This model coach was built as part of an exhibition undertaken in collaboration with Clothilde Highton GMC (Guild of Memorial Craftsmen), an Australian painter and sculptor living in Arundel, Sussex between 1946 and 1952, whose husband, an officer of the Royal Navy, had been killed in WWII. (The late) Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk gave Clothilde and Dennis the use of a room in Arundel Castle in which to carry out their work.

His formal training included reading Architecture at University College London and three years’ study in Florence (1953–1955) as a pupil of Pietro Annigoni (1910–1988), the internationally renowned grande maestro portrait painter of the 20th century (Annigoni subsequently became a godfather to Ramsay’s younger son, Justin).

Ramsay’s training included drawing, both in pencil and in china ink, as well as water colour. However, much of his time as a pupil of Annigoni involved oil tempera (or tempera grassa, i.e. egg-oil) – originally a 16th-century technique which entails meticulous time consuming work and which was revived in Italy during the 1930s by Dr Nikolai Lokoff, an exiled Russian industrial chemist and amateur painter. With the egg acting as an emulsifier, the technique allows water to be mixed with the paint thereby enabling the production of ultra-fine subtle glazes. However, as the paint is not commercially available, the artist must mix his own colours using pigment powders, oil, varnish, egg yolk and a preservative; uniquely, Ramsay discovered that Scotch whisky is an excellent preservative for the egg in the oil tempera mix! The result is work of permanence and colours that seem to glow with clarity and vitality. For all but the largest pictures his oil tempera works are painted on wooden panels, usually prepared with a heavy-duty paper lining glued to the panel. The survival after 500 years of early Flemish paintings with all their glorious luminous quality bears testament to the permanence of oil tempera as a medium. The process also involves the production of a ‘cartoon’ in pencil which is then transferred to the panel.

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