David Law was a nineteenth century painter, watercolourist and etcher, born in Edinburgh in 1831, he was apprenticed to a steel engraver at an early age. In 1845 he was admitted into the Trustees’ Academy, Edinburgh, where he studied under Alexander Christie and Emslie Dallas for the following five years. In 1851, he gained employment in the Ordnance Survey Office in Southampton, and engraved maps for the following twenty years.
At the age of over forty David Law decided to dedicate himself completely to artistic pursuits and moved to London. By 1873 he was exhibiting his art at many major institutions, including the Royal Academy. He was elected to membership of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1881 and the Society of British Artists in 1884 becoming its Treasurer in 1887 during the Presidency of Whistler.
He became most famous for landscape etchings, particularly river views of the Thames and elsewhere.
A number of his etchings were commissioned by the leading art journals of the day. Such is the case with Dittisham on the Dart, which was published by the Magazine of Art, London.

Law, was Scottish born, and many of his best works represented Scottish landscapes. His period of great popularity was at time when etching was in high fashion, between 1875 and 1890; he then produced large number of prints after his own drawings, or after Turner and other masters, some such as “Warwick Castle” and “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (Turner), were extremely successful!
He belonged to the older fashions of art but remained perhaps easily first in the school of landscape etchers. Many of his original plates – that is, etchings put direct on the plate without the intermediate stage of drawing – were acknowledged as masterpieces on the Continent. Among the favourites of these are Abbey and some big river scenes.