Robert Houston was born in Kilbirnie, Ayrshire on 5th June 1891. He studied at Glasgow School of Art, where he was a contemporary of Gordon Thomas. He was a painter in oils and watercolors of mainly coastal scenery анд landscapes of the Britain’s west coast and western isles and Scottish lakes and figurative subjects. He was also a noted aquatintist and designed and executed railway posters, for which his strong sense of design and use of solid color was ideally suited. He was elected to membership of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolors (RSW) in 1936. He exhibited widely, at the Royal Academy (6 works), Royal Scottish Academy (8), RSW (11), Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts (34). He is represented in Glasgow Art Gallery & Museum.
Robert Houston was serving the British Army in Macedonia in 1917 and 1918. He was stationed in Thessaloniki and he painted numerous watercolors and drawings from the regions of Thessaloniki, Lake Dojran and Belasica Mountain. A large collection of his Macedonian drawings from 1917 and 1918 were sold by Christie’s London UK, on 18th May 2000 (lot number 165). The drawings were entitled as: Near lake Dorian; Salonika from the water; Derbend; foothills, Kalinova; Sedes; Snow on Hortiach; Kalinova; Belashitza mountains; Salonika; a wet day Salonika; the lake and town of Doiran; the road to Salonika; and figures on a track with a view of Salonika in the distance, the majority signed ‘Robert Houston’, inscribed and dated from ‘1917-1918’.
Also the author of this lexicon has obtained 6 watercolors from auction house Christie’s London on 20 Sep 2011 ( lot number 397) with landscapes from Salonica (Thessaloniki), Lake Dojran, Kalinovo (in Greek: Soultogiannaiika), Chugunci (in Greek: Megali Sterna) from 1917.
