V
VALLANCE, WILLIAM FLEMING (1827–1904), marine painter, born at Paisley, on 13 Feb. 1827, was youngest son in the family of six sons and one daughter of David Vallance, tobacco manufacturer, by his wife Margaret Warden. William, whose father died in William's childhood, was sent at a very early age to work in a weaver's shop; but on the family's subsequent removal to Edinburgh he was apprenticed in 1841 as a carver and gilder to Messrs. Aitken Dott. During his apprenticeship he began to paint, and made a little money by drawing chalk-portraits; but he was twenty-three before he received any proper instruction. He then worked for a short time in the Trustees' Academy under E. Dallas, and later, from 1855, studied under R. S. Lauder [q. v.]. Vallance commenced to exhibit at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1849, but it was not until 1857 that he took up art as a profession. His earlier work had been chiefly portraiture and genre. After 1870 he painted, principally in Wicklow, Connemara, and Galway, a series of pictures of Lish life and character, humorous in figure and incident, and fresh in landscape setting. But a year or two spent in Leith in childhood had left its impress on his mind, and it was as a painter of the sea and shipping that he was eventually best known. His first pictures of this kind hovered between the Dutch convention and the freer and higher pitched art of his own contemporaries and countrymen. Gradually the influence of the latter prevailed, and in such pictures as 'Reading the War News' (1871), 'The Busy Clyde' (1880), and 'Knocking on the Harbour Walls' (1884) he attained a certain charm of silvery lighting, painting with considerable, if somewhat flimsy, dexterity. Probably, however, his feeling for nature found its most vital expression in the water-colours, often in body-colour, which he painted out-of-doors. Vallance was elected associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1875, and became academician in 1881. He died in Edinburgh on 30 Aug. 1904. On 2 Jan. 1856 he married in Edinburgh Elizabeth Mackie, daughter of James Bell, and by her had issue two sons and six daughters. His widow possesses a chalk portrait of him as a young man by John Pettie, R.A.
[Private information; Glasgow Evening News, 1888; catalogues and reports of R.S.A; Scotsman, 1 Sept. 1904.]
.
VANDAM, ALBERT DRESDEN (1843–1903), publicist and journalist, born in London in March 1843, was son of Mark Vandam, of Jewish descent, district commissioner for the Netherlands state lottery. Before he was thirteen he was sent to Paris, where he was privately educated and remained fifteen years. According to his own story, he was looked after in boyhood by two maternal great-uncles, who had been surgeons in Napoleon's army, had set up after Waterloo in private practice at Paris, enjoyed the entrée to the court of the second empire, and entertained at their house the leaders of Parisian artistic society. Vandam claimed that his youth was passed among French people of importance, and that he, at the same time, made the acquaintance of the theatrical and Bohemian worlds of the French capital (Vandam, My Paris Note-Book, pp. 1-3). He began his career as a journalist during the Prusso-Austrian war of 1866, writing for English papers, and he was correspondent for American papers during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. Settling in London in 1871, he engaged in translation from the French and Dutch and other literary work, occasionally going abroad on special missions for newspapers. From 1882 to 1887 Vandam was again in Paris as correspondent for the 'Globe,' subsequently making his home anew in London.
Vandam's 'An Englishman in Paris,' which was published anonymously in 1892 (2 vols.), excited general curiosity. It collected gossip of the courts of Louis Philippe and the second empire of apparently a very intimate kind. Vandam wrote again on French life and history, often depreciatingly, in 'My Paris Note-Book' (1894), 'French Men and French Manners' (1895), 'Undercurrents of the Second Empire' (1897), and 'Men and Manners of the Second Empire' (1904), but he did not repeat the success of his first effort. He translated for the first time into English, under the title of 'Social Germany in Luther's Time,' the interesting autobiography of the sixteenth-century Pomeranian notary, Bartholomew Sastrow, which he published in 1902 (with introduc-
