My Home Town

This See Us group that Blipfoto has started to celebrate creative Scotland, is such a brilliant idea. Letting the world know and see how the arts have always been important to this country. Everybody knows about how brilliant our scientists and inventors have been over the years, television, road coverings, pneumatic tyres, to name but 3 things; but our artistic endeavours, should be hailed also.
I am, in my contributions to the group, going concentrate on people from my home town, and the surrounding county.
We have had a few talented individuals over the years, from Annie Lennox, Yvonne Glennie and Mary Garden in the musical field, right up to and including a friend of our family, who is probably Britain's best known and best clown, Tweedy.
But if you go back a few centuries, you find this guy featured in the blip today.
He was born in Aberdeen, where his father, Andrew Jamesone, was a stonemason. Jamesone attended the grammar school near his home on Schoolhill and is thought to have gone on to further education at Marischal College. Legend has it that Jamesone once studied under Rubens in Antwerp with Anthony van Dyck. This is, however, yet to be proven as his name does not appear to be noted on the Guild registers of the town. Since Rubens was exempt from registering pupils, the absence of Jamesone's name does not mean that the painter definitely did not study there.
Jamesone certainly did complete an apprenticeship under the supervision of his uncle, John Anderson, who was a popular decorative painter in Edinburgh at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Jamesone finished this training in 1618. He is not recorded as being in Aberdeen again until 1620. If the Scotsman had gone to Antwerp, it would have had to have been between the years of 1618 to 1620.