Hugh Buchanan was born in Edinburgh in 1958. The city instilled in him a lifelong love of architecture, which he developed as a student at Edinburgh College of Art. After graduating in 1981 he worked on commissions for the National Trust and in 1987 was invited by the Prince of Wales to paint a series of interiors of Balmoral, subsequently completing a further sequence at Highgrove in 1994. In 1988 he was commissioned by the House of Commons to paint four interiors of the Palace of Westminster and in 2002 he was commissioned by the House of Lords to paint the lying in state of the Queen Mother at the Palace of Westminster. Hugh Buchanan's paintings are also in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Edinburgh City Art Centre, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Aberdeen, the Bank of Scotland, Flemings Bank and Deutsche Bank.