Introduction
Patrick Allan Fraser (1812 – 1890), was a Scottish painter and architect.
Biography
He was born Patrick Allan in Arbroath and first trained as a solicitor. He switched to house- or interior decorative painting, in which profession he met Robert Scott Lauder and accompanied him to Rome in the 1830s. On the way back he stopped to make cityscapes of Paris in 1838. Fraser returned to Arbroath in 1842 on the invitation of the Edinburgh publisher Cadell, who wanted him to illustrate a new edition of Scott's The Antiquary. The new edition, however, was never published. Back in the UK he married Elizabeth Fraser in 1843 and took on her name. Together they remodelled the Hospitalfield House. After his wife's death in 1873 he built a mauseleum in her name and later moved to Rome.
In 1856 the Frasers began the renovation of their Blackcraig estate in Strathardle. Patrick became an architect and supervised the renovation himself.
Style
Fraser's architectural style was described in his lecture Architecture With Special Reference to Local Buildings, which was published in The Building Chronicle issue of May 1854 as Amateur Criticism of Architectural Works. He stressed greatly on building economically and morally, notions that were expounded in his 1861 work An Unpopular View of Our Times.
