Born in Constable's, Bonington's and Turner's homeland, the "land of dreams" of famous modern watercolorists, this artist would say that Tahiti was "the Watercolorists Paradise".

He was Scottish and the son of a minister. When he was at school, a schoolteacher from a district in Aberdeen showed him how to produce a watercolor painting. This first lesson was to take him a long way. Being an orphan, his tutor sent him to a bank in London. This gave him an opportunity to attend night classes at St Martin's School of Arts. He would spend his weekends watercolor painting in the Lake District and was attracted by water. One thing led on to another and he soon found himself aboard a "Newfoundland fishing boat". He came up with an illustrated account of cod fishing, which was accepted by the London Illustrated News. He was given a nice sum of eleven guineas, his first earnings as a painter ! He was soon lucky enough to see one of his watercolor paintings of Blackfriars Bridge on the Thames hanging at an exhibition of the Royal Academy. It was given a very good critic by George Moor, an art critic for the Times. His art was now in the lime lights. He spent fifteen years living in the heart of London teaching Art and paintings at leisure. It was during this period that he did the paintings and drawings, which were published in 1917 under the title of London "Recalled" it was an excellent work of art and the illustrations were commented on by the famous English writer E. Beresford Chancellor. A large quantity of these watercolor paintings, which had been exhibited in the City, may now be found at the Guildhall Art Gallery.

Mac Donald then traveled, paintbrush in hand, to France, Italy and Sicily. He enjoyed going on a cargo steamer to admire the sea. After the First World War, he headed for New Zealand. It would appear, however, that he never arrived there, having been held up by a stop in Tahiti, in 1921. This island was to become his second homeland and the sky, lagoons and mountains filled him with joy. This is how he came to be classified amongst the artists who had been somewhat bewitched by Tahiti. Bewitched until he drew his last breath.

Having spent over twenty years in this archipelago, divided up into three stays, Mac Donald was a totally Tahitian painter. Being by nature a vagabond, he lived in several parts of the island, in Patutoa, then Pirae and also in Paea. He went round the archipelagoes and spent a diving season in the Tuamotu Islands to visit the low islands. He readily asked for the hospitality of his friends Hall and Nordman in Pao Pao or Moorea, which was his last call. This is where he settled in 1951 and where he died at the age of ninety five, even though he was still painting in spite of his failing eyesight.

Solely interested in his art, Mac Donald had a quiet nature and lived simply. He lived in harmony with nature and was totally detached from worldly goods. This is what he gave as an answer to an offer of financial support from the director of the Artist Fund, when he was an old man of ninety: "as long as I have six months' expenses in hand, I need nothing. Even at the end of his days, his watercolor paintings sold well. Tourists, Europeans or natives were always glad to find a familiar landscape, which had often been painted. Furthermore, money meant very little to him, for example, in the thirties he asked for 150 to 300 francs for a watercolor, paintings, which at these prices were gifts. After his death, they were being sold at ten times the price, and as for now! 

Bewitched by Tahiti, Mac Donald's religion was its light and atmosphere. But he found that the colors rendered by oil painting were too gaudy, too violent in tone to convey the impressions he derived from the sights he beheld and he unsparingly attempted to reproduce the continual stillness and even the shimmering light of things, as well as the slightest vibrations of a landscape and the most fleeting shades of the atmosphere. One almost recognizes the sound of water on the beach, the trade winds in the sky and the cry of a seabird as it sweeps with its wings the surface of the lagoon.

He liked direct and immediate mediums of expression, which enable one to note down almost instantaneously an impression together with its swiftness, lightness, suppleness, freshness and also the candor of its shades. All this was possible watercolor painting! The use of pure tones and also deep tones, spread with thick strokes equally conveyed these powerful effects. Mac Donald was definitely a wonderful watercolor painter as well as an expert technician and a sensitive and refined artist. He was just as capable of painting a sunset behind Moorea with all its fantastic colors as of representing Cook's Bay with its tragic and austere boldness.

He must have left a large number of paintings. What has become of them? Due to her jauntiness similar to that of a child spoilt by the daily gods and her congenital negligence of the past, Tahiti has never bothered to collect a single "series" of Mac Donald's watercolor paintings. We can imagine what pleasure we would have felt when looking at paintings of such and such a bay or beach, valley or motu, outlined by the artist at various times of day, with the respective light effects, in the mobile light of the sun or beneath the pale immovable reflections of the moon in all types of weather. Let us not dream. No Mac Donald "series" has been kept like Monet's "sequels". All of these watercolor paintings have disappeared here and there according to their respective destiny, tourists' and officials' souvenirs. Long live these souvenirs of Tahiti!