Elected ARSA: 8 November 1876
The son of an Edinburgh Solicitor, Sir Robert Rowand Anderson was born in 1834. His father intended him for his own profession, but from his earliest year he had been fond of drawing, and he became a pupil in the Ornamental Department of the Trustees’ School of Design. In due time he passed into the Antique and studied under Scott Lauder, where he was intimately associated with some of that Master’s painter pupils. Later he attended the Academy’s Life Class. After an apprenticeship of some years in the office of John Lessels, a prominent Edinburgh Architect, young Anderson visited France, Italy and Holland, working at times in such offices as he could get access to, and everywhere, by the diligent use of notebook and memory, laying the foundations of his long and successful career.
Sir Rowand’s association with the Academy dates from 1860 when he began his own business in Edinburgh. In recognition of his achievements as an Architect on the design of the New Medical School, the University of Edinburgh conferred on him the honorary degree of LL.D in 1884. Anderson was more than once invited by the Government to submit designs for works of Imperial importance; the last occasion being the competition for the Queen Victoria Memorial in 1901. Shortly thereafter he received the honour of Knighthood from His Majesty King Edward VII.
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Museum of Antiquities, commissioned from him by the donor, the late John Ritchie Findlay, in 1884; the restoration of Dunblane Cathedral, and the building of Mount Stuart House for the Marquess of Bute, are Sir Rowand’s most important works during the later decades of the nineteenth century; but contemporaneously with these he carried out restorations of the Abbeys of Paisley and Culross, and of the Chapel, King’s College, Aberdeen.
Sir Rowand Anderson was keenly interested in everything bearing on Scottish Architecture, and alongside a professional activity rarely surpassed in any of the Arts, by strength of will and purpose he did much towards the raising of the status of the profession north of the Tweed. In 1916 he became the president for the Institute of Scottish Architects until his death on 1st June 1921.
He had been elected an Associate of the Academy in 1876, but in 1883, as a protest against the neglect of Architecture in the elections to premier rank, he resigned his position. In 1896 Sir Rowand was re-elected an Honorary Member.
In 1916, he received the highest recognition open to a British Architect, when he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal, a distinction conferred annually on the one of European reputation considered most worthy of it by his fellows in the Royal Institute of British Architects.
