"I think that I was born inhaling oil paint," John Maclauchlan Milne once remarked of a career that took him from a Fife painting family, through a spell working as a cowboy in Canada, to Royal Flying Corps service on the Western Front, and finally to Paris, where a first encounter with the work of Cézanne, in his own obituarist's words, left him "immediately conquered." Born in Buckhaven in 1885, the son of the landscape painter Joseph Milne and nephew of the painter William Watt Milne, he trained initially under his father before this formative period abroad reshaped his artistic direction entirely.
Demobbed in 1919, Milne arrived in Paris the following year and, alongside his friend and fellow Scot Samuel Peploe, underwent what both artists' contemporaries recognised as a genuine post-Impressionist conversion, abandoning the more muted, atmospheric palette of his earlier Scottish-Dutch influenced work for the bold colour planes and fluid brushwork associated with Cézanne and the French moderns. From 1924 he painted extensively in Cassis and Saint-Tropez alongside Peploe, Francis Cadell and Duncan Grant, sharing patrons and exhibiting alongside the artists who would later be packaged together, somewhat to Milne's own historical disadvantage, as "the Scottish Colourists"; art historians today more often refer to him as "the Fifth Scottish Colourist" or, in his adopted city, "the Dundee Colourist." He maintained a studio in Dundee for some twenty years, was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1933 and a full Academician in 1937, and continued to travel and paint in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, particularly Arran, Iona and Perthshire, through the 1930s, eventually settling on Arran, where he lived until his death in 1957.
The painting by Milne held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, A Walled Garden, exemplifies the bright, confidently coloured landscape practice that Cézanne's example, filtered through Milne's own long engagement with the French Mediterranean and later applied equally to Scottish subjects, made possible, and connects the gallery's British twentieth-century holdings to one of Scottish painting's most distinctive, if historically somewhat overshadowed, colourist voices.