Kathleen, 1906

Harrington Mann was a Scottish portrait painter, decorator and designer of stained glass windows. After his training in Glasgow, he broadened his artistic horizons in London and in Paris. In 1888, he returned to his hometown and joined the Glasgow Boys, a group of local painters who achieved international success at the end of the 19th century. Their pictorial realism connects with the naturalism of the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. His earliest works from the 1880s are related to the fishing community in Yorkshire. In the 1890s he made name as a portrait painter. In his London studio, he specialised in society portraits, of children in particular, but also of members of the royal family. Later, he also opened a studio in New York. The influence of James Abbott McNeill Whistler can be felt in his strong sense of colour, and that of John Singer Sargent in his powerful brushwork.