William Crosbie was born in 1915 in Hankow, China to Scottish parents. The family returned to Glasgow in 1926, and in 1932 the young Crosbie was accepted to the Glasgow School of Art.
A travelling scholarship enabled him to study in Paris under Aristide Maillol and Fernand Léger, and he later took a job with the Archaeological Institute on an expedition to Egypt, where he copied friezes in the newly-excavated Temple of the Bulls and Temple of Sakhara.
Upon his return to Glasgow in 1939, he engaged with ‘a little local renaissance’ with figures including the Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and the Kelvingrove director Thomas John Honeyman. During the 1940s Crosbie produced several fine portraits of important Scottish cultural figures.
His eye for bold, graphic form was honed following the Second World War when Crosbie worked as a mural painter, predominantly for the architects Jack Coia and Basil Spence, as well as a commission for the Festival of Britain in 1951.