Archibald Thorburn was born at Viewfield House in Lasswade near Edinburgh on 31 May 1860. He was the fifth son of the miniaturist to Queen Victoria, Robert Thorburn. From a very early age Archibald was intrigued by all forms of wildlife and by the time he was six or seven years old was already often to be found drawing and sketching twigs, leaves, and flowers from the garden at Viewfield House. It quickly became apparent that he had inherited his father’s artistic skills and by the age of twelve he was producing some beautiful watercolour drawings and pen and ink studies that already showed exceptional talent and great promise of things to come. Archibald Thorburn was to become the greatest ornithological artist, widely acclaimed as superior to all contemporaries in the same field, with a wonderful gift for placing his subjects in harmonious surroundings.

He exhibited ornithological paintings at the Royal Academy from the age of 20, he also exhibited regularly at the Royal Society of British Artists, the Fine Art Society and the Dudley Gallery. Thorburn’s first published colour plates were in W.F. Swayland’s Familiar Wild Birds published in 1882 but his breakthrough came when Lord Lilford employed him to complete the work on Coloured Figures for the Birds of the British Islands, published between 1885-1898, after the original artist John Gerrard Keulemans (1842-1912) fell ill.

For many of his contemporaries, Thorburn was the greatest natural history painter Britain had produced; “a giant who represented the culmination of a great nineteenth century tradition and showed the way forward to greater naturalism”. For more than fifty years, from his first published work in 1883 to his death in 1935, Thorburn was in constant demand both as a book illustrator and as the painter of larger, private commissions showing birds and mammals in their natural landscapes.

In 1927 Thorburn was elected as Vice President of the Royal Society for the Protection of British Birds in recognition for his services to bird life in Britain.