Biography

John Bogle was the son of a Scottish excise officer. In the 1760s he trained at the recently founded Foulis Academy in Glasgow and was then briefly based in Edinburgh. In 1770 he moved to London where he was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, returning to Edinburgh in 1800. A brilliant portrait miniaturist, a contemporary wrote of him: 'He excelled in small likenesses, was a little lame man, very proud, very poor and very singular'.