Leader Scott

Pseudonym for Lucy Baxter

Biography:

Baxter [née Barnes], Lucy [pseud. Leader Scott] (1837–1902), writer on art, was born at Dorchester on 21 January 1837, the third daughter of William Barnes (1801–1886), the Dorset poet and philologist, and his wife, Julia, née Miles (1805–1852). Her childhood seems to have been a happy one, despite the family's straitened finances and her mother's death in 1852. Barnes was an affectionate father who believed in persuasion rather than punishment, and his multifarious literary, linguistic, antiquarian, and artistic interests no doubt influenced Lucy's tastes. He rescued old paintings from junk shops, cleaned them, and used them in the education of his children; in her 1887 biography of her father—still the standard quarry for the Barnes scholar, despite the inadequacy of its treatment of his early life—Lucy Baxter claimed that he had thus acquired a Ribera and a Gainsborough.

From an early age, Lucy Barnes determined to pursue a literary career and, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, it was by writing stories and magazine articles that she earned enough money to visit Italy in the 1860s. Another account suggests that she went there as a governess to a family who were travelling on the continent. While in Italy, Lucy Barnes met and in 1867 married Samuel Thomas Baxter, whose family had long been established in Florence; they settled at Villa Bianca, at the foot of the hills near Vincigliata and Settignano. Mrs Baxter became a prominent figure in Anglo-Florentine and Italian literary and artistic circles in the city, and the Accademia di Belle Arti elected her an honorary member in 1882.

Lucy Baxter's many publications appeared under the pseudonym of Leader Scott—a combination of the maiden names of her grandmothers. She collaborated with John Temple Leader, probably a relative and also resident in Florence. Her works consisted of popularizations of scholarly work on Florentine art and artists, including Luca della Robbia (1883), The Renaissance of Art in Italy (1883), and Correggio (1902), and more lightweight essays, which were often later collected and republished. The best-known of these collections was Echoes of Old Florence (1894), but a typical example was Tuscan Studies and Sketches (1887): half of this work was devoted to studies of Florentine art and architecture, derived from her researches in the Magliabecchiana and other Florentine libraries and archives, while the other half consisted of travel essays (describing, among others, visits to the seaside at Pisa and to the medieval town of San Gimignano) and accounts of Italian customs such as the festival of the dead. Her magnum opus was The Cathedral Builders (1899), a monumental work examining Romanesque architecture and the role of magistri comacini in its creation. Although largely based on I maestri comacini (1893), Giuseppe Merzario's work on the same subject, which she had originally hoped to translate into English, The Cathedral Builders—which was beautifully illustrated with both photographs and fine drawings—did show her keen eye for architectural detail and involved some archival research. Her main arguments, however, were advanced with a boldness not justified by the evidence, which was scanty at best in the early medieval period. Her presentation of the magistri as a fully organized and all-enveloping masonic guild from the sixth or seventh centuries AD is decidedly speculative; although her work was no doubt a useful introduction to the subject for the English-speaking reader, it was entirely ignored by twentieth-century scholars of Romanesque architecture.

Lucy Baxter was much distressed by the death of a daughter in 1900; her grief seems to have damaged her health and she died at the Villa Bianca on 10 November 1902, survived by her husband, two daughters, and a son. Although the reigning matriarch of Anglo-Florentine society for many years (her place was now taken by the less erudite but more imposing Janet Ross), she had governed with a gentle hand; one contemporary recalled with affection the ‘serene gentleness of [her] old-fashioned feminine presence’ (The Athenaeum).

Rosemary Mitchell

(“Baxter , Lucy [Leader Scott] (1837–1902),” Rosemary Mitchell in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2010, Accessed August 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)