John Adam Houston was born in 1812 in North Wales to Scottish parents. In the late 1820s, he studied in Edinburgh under Sir William Allan and was greatly influenced by Sir David Wilkie, one of the great figures of Scottish painting in the early nineteenth century.

Houston's style incorporates the gusto and richness of the Scottish Realist school with contrasting warm colours and deep areas of shadow. He specialised in historical and genre painting and regularly exhibited in London and Edinburgh, including An Arab (1847) and An Incident in the Desert (1854).