The Prince of Wales in Ceylon – The Prince’s Highland Piper Astonishing the Kandyan Natives. [Sri Lanka]

Biography:

William Small (1843-1929)
William Small was a Scot. Born in Edinburgh, on 27 May 1843, he later worked in that city as a hack-artist designing illustrations of bedsteads and gas brackets. He trained at the Royal Scottish Academy and moved to London in 1865, where he quickly established himself as a versatile painter and illustrator. In his paintings he was mainly concerned with rustic themes, and some of his later work embodies a journalistic representation of the sufferings of the poor. Painted in the social realist style of Herkomer and Bastien-Lepage, these paintings are still collected. However, he has always been principally known as an illustrator whose work bore comparison with the best of his contemporaries.