Most respectfully dedicated to Sir James Stirling Bart. Lord Provost of the City by the Publisher. 
 
The Artist: Andrew Wilson (1755-1848). 
Born in Edinburgh, Wilson studied art under Alexander Nasmyth, and then, at the age of seventeen, went to London, where he worked for some time in the schools of the Royal Academy. He travelled extensively to Italy between 1800 and 1805.  Settling in London, he achieved success as both a practicing artist and an art dealer. His landscape paintings of Scotland employed the classicising use of suffused light and stillness. . After eight years as master of the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, Wilson settled in Italy in 1826, where his chief activity was picture dealing. He returned for a visit to Scotland in 1847 but died the following year before his trip to rejoin his family in Italy. 
 
The Engraver: Scott, Robert (1777–1841), 
 
Scott was apprenticed to the engraver, Alexander Robertson in 1787 and trained at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh under David Allan. He  is best remembered for his landscape engravings, such as Views of Seats and Scenery Chiefly in the Environs of Edinburgh (1795–6), from drawings by A. Carse and A. Wilson, and his illustrations to George Barry's History of the Orkney Islands (1805) and the 1808 edition of Gentle Shepherd. The National Gallery of Scotland hold a large volume of this work which depict antique subjects in chalk, engravings of portraits and book illustrations as well as landscapes. From this and from his undeniable ability as a draughtsman he could have pursued a career as a painter, but he preferred to pursue the commercial success that a career in engraving offered rather than the less financially secure life of a painter. 
 
In 1799 he set up his own engraving workshop in Parliament Square in Edinburgh and, after that premises was destroyed by fire in 1824, he set up shop at 65 Princes Street. He had the equipment for copperplate-engraving, etching, mezzotinting, aquatinting, and lithography and also introduced to Edinburgh the art of engraving on steel.
Scott's last work was a set of twenty views, Scenery of Edinburgh and Midlothian (1838), from drawings by his son W. B. Scott, who  had been trained by his father as an engraver.