Farquhar MacRae

Farquhar Junior was born on 30th March 1764. He was a Doctor of Medicine, and was appointed Medical Officer to Lord Macartney’s Embassy to China in 1792-1794. He was afterwards killed in a duel with a Major Blair in Demerara in 1802. He is said to have been “handsome and comely in personal appearance, and strong in proportion.” His portrait is represented as Colin Fitzgerald, the founder of the house of Seaforth in Benjamin West’s celebrated deer hunt painting in Brahan Castle. The artist accidentally saw him one day in Hyde Park, and, being struck by his appearance asked him if he would sit as a model for the founder of the House of Seaforth, which he readily consented to do. Farquhar Junior was not only a native of the ancestral country of the Seaforths, but was also closely related to that family, and it is a remarkable fact that he should have struck the artist, to whom he was a perfect stranger, as a suitable representative for the hero of the painting.

born on November 25th 1805, at Camuslunie. He received his early education from a well-known Kintail schoolmaster, Finlay Macrae, commonly called Finlay Fadoch. In 1816 he was admitted to a Macra [sic] bursary at Aberdeen Grammar school, where he had for his teacher the celebrated classical scholar and Gaelic poet, Ewen Maclauchlan. He entered University in 1819, and after a distinguished career, graduated MA in 1823. He studied Divinity from 1823 to 1827. From 1825 to 1833 he was schoolmaster of Lochcarron, and was licensed by the Presbytery of Lochcarron in 1829. He was stationed at South Uist for eight years and then went to Braemar. At the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1845 he cast in his lot with the Free Church, and in 1849 he became minister of the Free Church in Knockbain, in succession to his well known fellow clansman, the renowned Rev. John Macrae of Knockbain. Here he lived and laboured, trusted and respected by his people until his death, which occurred at Nairn on the 20th December 1882. He was a man of much culture and sound scholarship, and an able and eloquent preacher, equally good both in Gaelic and in English. He married Anne Murray and had one son, -- Francis Farquhar Macrae.