Optical connections: The optician whose first love was art

What do opticians keep in the back room of their premises? In times past, it was often the optician who was in the back room when there were such things as jeweller-opticians and chemist-opticians. But what about the probably unique case of the electrical repairman-optician who, in the early 20th century, used his back room to produce distinctive paintings whose combined sales have fetched several hundred thousand pounds.

It’s fair to say that art was John Quinton Pringle’s (1864 – 1925) first love, rather than optics. This artistic tendency may have been inherited from his grandfather, a carpet designer named James Christie. When Christie’s son was orphaned, he was looked after by a guardian, John Pringle, whose surname he adopted. He married another orphan, the couple having eight children – seven boys and a girl – of which John Quinton was the second. Another influence was that Pringle’s father, a railway worker, was appointed stationmaster at Langbank, a small town near Glasgow popular with artists. The family moved there in 1869 when Pringle was five years old, spending five years in an environment in which he would have become used to seeing artists at work.