ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION | AMERICAN MASTERS

George J. Robertson

The son of a Presbyterian minister, George J. Robertson was born in 1810 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts in London from 1826 to 1836, exhibiting there regularly alongside John Constable and other important artists of the era before immigrating to the United States in 1842, working in Cleveland and Milwaukee before settling in Rockford by 1857. Listed as a portrait painter in early city directories, he is most likely Rockford's first resident professional artist. Robertson served as the first head of the art department at Rockford Female Seminary, now Rockford College, from 1860 to 1886, where he introduced elements of his academic training such as the study of anatomy and the drawing of plaster casts of Classical sculpture. A key figure in the area's cultural development, he was an early member of the Rockford Sketch Club (which became Rockford Art Association, now Rockford Art Museum) and participated in its first exhibition in 1888. Although best known for portraiture, Robertson produced extraordinary landscapes of Rockford in its infancy.