Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 62.djvu/33

 principal means of his subsistence’ (Sketches of the Progress of Botany, i. 349). As Aubrey records that ‘all the profession he had was to make pegges for shoes’ (loc. cit.), this last supposition of Pulteney's is highly probable. Aubrey is our authority for all else we know of Willisel. ‘When,’ he says, ‘ye Lord John Vaughan, now Earle of Carbery [see under, second ], was made governour of Jamaica [in 1674], I did recommend him to his excellency, who made him his gardiner there. He dyed within a yeare after his being there, but had made a fine collection of plants and shells, which the Earle of Carbery hath by him; and had he lived he would have given the world an account of the plants, animals, and fishes of that island. He could write a hand indifferent legible, and had made himself master of all the Latine names: he pourtrayed but untowardly’ (loc. cit.) Some plants collected by Willisel are preserved in Sir Hans Sloane's herbarium.

[Authorities above cited.] 

WILLISON, GEORGE (1741–1797), portrait-painter, born in 1741, was a son of David Willison, an Edinburgh printer and publisher, and a grandson of John Willison [q. v.] In 1756 he was awarded a prize for a drawing of flowers by the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and Sciences, and in the two following years his name again figures in the prize-list. After this his uncle, George Dempster [q. v.] of Dunnichen, sent him to Rome to continue his studies, and on his return he settled in London, where, between 1767 and 1777, he exhibited some six-and-twenty portraits at the Royal Academy. But meeting with little encouragement, he went to India and painted many portraits, including those of some native princes, one of which (that of the nabob of Arcot) is now at Hampton Court. He possessed a certain knowledge of medicine, and cured a wealthy person of a dangerous wound of long standing, in gratitude for which he had some time afterwards a considerable fortune bequeathed to him. Then he returned to Edinburgh, where he continued to paint, and where he died in April 1797. His pictures are pleasant in colour and rather graceful in arrangement, his characterisation fair, his handling easy if somewhat thin. A number of his portraits were engraved by Valentine Green and James Watson.

A medallion portrait of Willison (dated 1792) by Guillame is in the Scottish Portrait Gallery.

[Scots Magazine, 1755–8; Millar's Eminent Burgesses of Dundee, 1887; Cat. Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Ernest Law's Hampton Court; Redgrave's, Bryan's, and Graves's Dictionaries.] 

WILLISON, JOHN (1680–1750), Scottish divine, was born in 1680 at or near Stirling, where his family had been long settled and possessed considerable property. He was the eldest son of James Willison Mill of Craigforth and Bethia Gourlay, his spouse. He entered the university of Glasgow in 1695, and, though sometimes styled M.A., his name does not appear in the list of graduates. He was licensed by the presbytery of Stirling in 1701, appointed to the parish of Brechin by the united presbytery of Brechin and Arbroath in 1703, and ordained in December of that year. Many of his parishioners were Jacobites and episcopalians, and he encountered much opposition from them. In 1705 he reported to the presbytery that the former episcopal minister had retaken possession of the pulpit for the afternoon service on Sundays, that the magistrates refused to render him any assistance, and that he was told that he would be rabbled if he tried to oust the intruder. In 1712 he published a pamphlet entitled ‘Queries to the Scots Innovators in Divine Service, and particularly to the Liturgical Party in the Shire of Angus. By a Lover of the Church of Scotland;’ and in 1714 ‘A Letter from a Parochial Bishop to a Prelatical Gentleman concerning the Government of the Church.’ In 1716 Willison was translated from Brechin to the South church, Dundee. In 1719 he published an ‘Apology for the Church of Scotland against the Accusations of Prelatists and Jacobites,’ and in 1721 a letter to an English M.P. on the bondage in which the Scottish people were kept from the remains of the feudal system. In 1726 he preached before the general assembly, and from about this time he took a prominent place among the leaders of the popular party in the church. In his own presbytery he strenuously opposed John Glas [q. v.], minister of Tealing, who founded the ‘Glassites,’ otherwise called Sandemanians, and in 1729 Willison published a treatise against his tenets entitled ‘A Defence of the National Church, and particularly of the National Constitution of the Church of Scotland, against the Cavils of Independents.’

During the controversy which ended in the deposition of Ebenezer Erskine [q. v.] and his followers, Willison exerted himself to the utmost to prevent a schism. At the synod of Angus in 1733 he preached a sermon urging conciliatory measures, which was published under the title ‘The Church's