William Bell Scott

Scott, William Bell (British painter, author, 1811-1890).

Biography:

Scott, William Bell (1811–1890), poet and painter, was the son of an Edinburgh engraver, Robert Scott (1777–1841) and his wife, Ross, daughter of Robert Bell, mason. He was the younger brother of the painter and poet David Scott (1806–1849). William Bell Scott had five older brothers, but four of them had died in an epidemic in 1807, leaving David Scott the only survivor of the ‘older family’, as Scott came to regard it. His parents never recovered from their loss and his mother would often call William by the name of one or other of the children who had died. Like his father and his brother, Scott did not go to Edinburgh University but instead trained in fine art at the Trustees' Academy. With his brother David he was among a group of remarkable painters including William Dyce (with whom he later became friendly), Robert Scott Lauder, William Leighton Leitch, and Daniel Macnee. Robert Scott admired Blake's engravings and such works as Henry Fuseli's illustrations to Milton, and David and William were set to copy these works every evening; it was a quiet, serious, industrious household. Again through his father and brother Scott had access to literary circles in Edinburgh, and he met Walter Scott (who gave advice on one of his early poems, and to whom he believed he was distantly related); John Wilson (Christopher North), the celebrated conservative critic; Thomas De Quincey, whom he greatly admired; and the chemist, Dr Samuel Brown (subject of one of David Scott's most successful portraits), who became a close friend both of Scott and of his most valued patron, Lady Trevelyan. The first fruits of William Bell Scott's talents appeared in 1831 when he published his first poem, ‘In Memory of P. B. Shelley’, in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine (edited by John Wilson), and showed two small paintings at the Trustees' Academy. In 1834 he exhibited his first picture at the Royal Scottish Academy (a subject from Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner) and with a friend he edited the Edinburgh University Souvenir.

Move to London

Scott moved from Edinburgh to London in 1837 in order to establish himself as a painter. His first major painting, The Old English Ballad Singer, was exhibited at the British Institution in 1839. The painting has a typically learned and serious source. He was prompted by Sir Philip Sidney's praise for ‘the old song of Percy and Douglas’ in Apology for Poetry to imagine the singer of what was popularly known as the ballad of Chevy Chase, recording the battle of Otterburn (1388). (Scott would return to this subject for his decorative paintings at Wallington Hall in the 1860s.) The first painting that he had accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy was Chaucer, John of Gaunt and their Wives (1842). Scott's London circle included an older generation—Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Haydon, and Carlyle—and painters making good commercial careers, such as W. P. Frith and Augustus Egg, and he met Tennyson and Browning. He is thought to be the inspiration for the unknown ambitious painter in Browning's poem ‘Pictor ignotus’. Leigh Hunt helpfully promoted Scott as a poet and introduced him to younger literary men including G. H. Lewes, later George Eliot's partner. Among the younger artists and sculptors he knew Ford Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, J. E. Millais, Alexander Munro, and Thomas Woolner. He recalled making friends with Richard Dadd shortly before that brilliant and unstable painter murdered his father and was shut away in an asylum.

Scott's most intimate contact in London was with the Rossetti family. When D. G. Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt formed themselves into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), William Bell Scott was closely associated with them. Some of his poems, including ‘Rosabell’ (a narrative poem based on his meeting with an Edinburgh prostitute) and ‘A Dream of Love’ were published by Leigh Hunt in the Monthly Respository in 1846, and D. G. Rossetti was prompted by the poems to make contact with him. Rossetti sought his advice about his own poetry (including ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and ‘My Sister's Sleep’) and invited Scott to contribute poems to the PRB's journal, The Germ. Two of his poems appeared: ‘Morning Sleep’ and ‘Early Aspirations’. The latter, a sonnet, is a very personal meditation on ambition and failure, themes with which Scott would be obsessed for much of his life. The young PRB members were initially mocked by the critics, but in 1851 they were powerfully defended by John Ruskin, the most influential art critic in the country, and for the young men the tide turned. Scott was left out; his own work, like that of Ford Madox Brown, was never praised, or indeed mentioned, by Ruskin, and both painters felt, with good reason, that their careers in London in the 1840s were blighted by the care with which Ruskin distanced himself from their work.

Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti were for some years loyal champions of Scott's work, and Christina Rossetti was a close friend (although there is no evidence for the story that she and Scott were in love for a time). All the Rossettis in due course visited Scott in Newcastle, where he lived first in St Thomas's Street, later in St Thomas's Crescent, very close to his School of Design (the houses in which he lived still stand). Through Scott the Rossettis met Lady Trevelyan, who in turn bought some of D. G. Rossetti's work. As a young man William Bell Scott was tall, good-looking, and had an appealing Scottish accent, and D. G. Rossetti dubbed him a ‘stunner’ (a term Rossetti normally reserved for astonishingly beautiful women such as Lizzie Siddall and Jane Burden—Mrs William Morris—the artists' models who in due course became Rossetti's wife and mistress respectively). Scott's closeness to the Rossettis led to a plan for an Italian tour in summer 1862 with Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti; in the event Dante Gabriel was unable to travel following the death of his wife, Lizzie Siddall, earlier in the year, and Scott and W. M. Rossetti went to Italy without him. This tour was brief but of lasting importance for Scott because of his first hand exposure to Italian Renaissance painting.

On 31 October 1839 Scott married Letitia Margery Norquoy, a woman considerably older than himself who was regarded by all his friends as a shrill, neurotic, demanding, and difficult person. The marriage was clearly unhappy, it was childless, and may have been unconsummated (like the Ruskins'), but Scott and his wife never formally separated. In 1843 Scott submitted a cartoon for a large decorative painting in the competition for the adornment of the new houses of parliament. He was unsuccessful, but his painting caused him to be appointed in November 1843 as the first master of the School of Design, as it was then called, at Newcastle upon Tyne (it was later part of the national art school system established by Henry Cole for the improvement of manufacturing design). He took an enlightened attitude to his job, seeing it as a way of discovering talent among working-class men (all the students were men). His teaching was in tension with the general scheme of the schools of design, and later (after 1851) with Henry Cole's overarching scheme: Scott was happy to give individual tuition, to have his students study from the human figure, and to allow them to aspire beyond industrial design, none of which was approved by the London authorities running the scheme.

The Wallington scheme

The tide turned for William Bell Scott when he made friends with the most generous and visionary of his patrons, Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan of Wallington Hall, Northumberland. Pauline Trevelyan (1806–1866) initially became interested in him when she was invited to review his Memoir of David Scott (1850). She was a close friend of John Ruskin, and with Ruskin's general guidance she commissioned a decorative scheme for the central hall of Wallington, which she had had enclosed by John Dobson, the celebrated Newcastle architect. Between 1855 and 1861 Scott painted eight scenes of Northumbrian history, starting with the building of Hadrian's Wall and ending with a scene showing contemporary Newcastle industry by the Tyne. This last painting, called Iron and Coal, the Nineteenth Century, is Scott's most important single achievement. It celebrates progress and the dignity of the labourer much in the manner of Ford Madox Brown's Work, in which heroically sturdy young road builders are admired and applauded by F. D. Maurice (founder of the Working Men's College) and Thomas Carlyle. (Brown had started work on his painting in 1852, and although it was not finished until later than Iron and Coal it is likely that it influenced Scott.) Road building is not manufacture, of course, and Scott's painting has the distinction of being the only Pre-Raphaelite painting which records an industrial process.

Iron and Coal closes an alternating sequence of subjects: there are four paintings of notable figures (Cuthbert, Bede, Gilpin, and Grace Darling) and four of historical periods (the Roman, the Viking, the border wars, and the nineteenth century). Scott continued to work on the Wallington scheme with a mural of the battle of Chevy Chase on the upper walls of the central saloon. He hoped to be commissioned to complete the scheme with a ceiling design, but after Pauline's death in 1866 the motive force for the decoration of Wallington had gone. Sir Walter Trevelyan married again and the second Lady Trevelyan (formerly Laura Capell Lofft, a close friend of Pauline Trevelyan) disliked Scott and terminated the commission.

The Wallington decorative scheme brought fame to William Bell Scott and the Trevelyans and transformed the reputation of the arts in the north-east. In 1855, the year in which Pauline conceived the Wallington scheme, a local journalist wrote in despair that the ‘fine arts in Newcastle appear literally to be dead and buried’, and that with the growing prosperity of the people of Newcastle and Sunderland came a growing ignorance of art and a preference for ‘champagne and claret’ (Quinn, 53). By 1862 that had been significantly changed. The Wallington scheme was recognized as an innovation of national as well as regional significance, and it was widely reviewed in the national press. The paintings were exhibited in London before finally being hung in Wallington. The only comparable recent decorative scheme was the frescoes of Arthurian subjects painted by Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Morris, Val Prinsep, and others in Thomas Deane's and Benjamin Woodward's new Gothic Oxford Union building in 1857. Scott's Wallington paintings prompted similar decorative schemes elsewhere in the country, such as the cycle of twelve historical paintings for Manchester town hall (depicting episodes in the history of Manchester from Roman times to the recent past) undertaken by Ford Madox Brown in the 1870s, and the later decorative scheme commissioned for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Relations with Ruskin

Scott's abiding resentment against Ruskin was brought into sharp focus by jealousy. As the famous critic was one of Lady Trevelyan's closest friends, Scott inevitably felt himself in unequal rivalry for her attention. When Ruskin had earlier befriended and patronized D. G. Rossetti, Scott had felt that one of his closest male friends in effect was being stolen. The froideur with Ruskin did Scott damage. He found it necessary to disparage J. M. W. Turner only because Ruskin had championed that painter, and although Scott was studiously Pre-Raphaelite in his methods he mocked and condemned Ruskin's teaching techniques at the Working Men's College in London from 1854 onwards. (Ruskin's teaching involved faithful observation of natural forms, the central doctrine of the Pre-Raphaelites.) After Ruskin's wife, Effie, left him for J. E. Millais, Scott wrote that Lady Trevelyan had seen that Millais and Effie were in love when they stayed at Wallington in 1853, and had tried to persuade Sir Walter to warn Ruskin of this. There is no evidence for this, and Lady Trevelyan's diary makes it clear that this story of Scott's is just an invention, a product of his immovable dislike of Ruskin.

Ménage à trois

In 1859 William Bell Scott met Alice Boyd, of Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, when she came to study art in Newcastle. He used her as a model (she figures prominently in the foreground of Scott's own favourite among his sea paintings, Grace Darling, at Wallington Hall). The relationship became very close. Scott's wife, Letitia, accepted the situation—presumably she had little choice—and from the 1860s Scott lived with Alice Boyd and with Letitia in a ménage à trois in Scotland and London until the end of his life. His relationship with Alice Boyd led to Scott's second commission for another important decorative scheme. After the death of her brother in 1865 Alice became the owner of Penkill and over several years in the 1860s Scott painted there a series of frescoes illustrating James I's poem The King's Quair.

In 1862 the national management of art schools had changed again, and Scott, appointed under the previous system, was offered redundancy (with a pension) which he took after some hesitation in 1863. At about this date he suffered a disorder which caused him to become totally bald, and he took to wearing a wig. He went back to London and thereafter divided his time between the metropolis and Penkill. He was commissioned by Henry Cole to design stained-glass windows for the South Kensington Museum (now the Victorian and Albert Museum) in London; he worked as an examiner in the London art schools during this period and edited literary texts. In 1870 he was able to buy a substantial property in London: Bellevue House, 92 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. For the last eight years of his life he was disabled by angina, and was nursed by Alice Boyd until his death at Penkill on 22 November 1890.

Reputation

At his best William Bell Scott was a distinguished painter. Iron and Coal and Grace Darling are major achievements. Among Scott's many good portraits are his remarkably vivid study of Swinburne (Balliol College, Oxford) and his beautiful and affectionate profile portrait of Lady Trevelyan which hangs with his more formal portrait of Sir Walter Trevelyan at Wallington. His big, ambitious painting of the building of the New Castle (the medieval structure which gives Newcastle its name) was commissioned by subscription to mark his retirement from the Newcastle post in 1863, was completed in 1865, and is now in the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society's collection.

Scott was also a serious and versatile poet, and saw himself in competition with his friend D. G. Rossetti as a master of the twin arts of poetry and painting. (He was perhaps more industrious in both these arts than was Rossetti.) He took the view that his ‘fallen woman’ poem, ‘Rosabell’ (about an Edinburgh prostitute) was the inspiration both for Rossetti's poem ‘Jenny’ and for his painting Found. Found was never finished, but at one point it was commissioned by the Newcastle patron James Leathart, who was introduced to Rossetti by Scott. In his lifetime Leathart, often with Scott's help, built up one of the most important collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the country, but his business failed and the collection had to be sold.

William Bell Scott's philosophical poetry includes Hades and the Progress of the Mind (1838), and the long and grandiose The Year of the World (1846). His lyric and narrative poetry, often very attractive, is found at its best in the small collection Poems (better known as Poems by a Painter) (1854) and the larger Poems by William Bell Scott (illustrated by Scott and Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, 1875) and A Poet's Harvest Home (1882).

The most important of Scott's prose works is his biography of his brother, Memoir of David Scott (1850), the book which made William Bell Scott into a familiar name. Scott was deeply distressed by his brother's early death in 1849, and the biography is a moving and well written but also clear-sighted account. He also published a great number of books arising directly from his work as a teacher—a large volume of half-hour lectures on the whole history of European art, for example—and many introductions to edited texts, which in his later life made a substantial part of his literary income.

William Bell Scott wrote an autobiography in the 1850s which he seems to have abandoned and partly destroyed about 1855, and then returned to and completed in the 1870s. It was published posthumously in 1892 as Autobiographical Notes, edited by a friend, Professor W. Minto of Aberdeen. The book betrays some bitterness and disappointment, and a tendency to bolster his own reputation by seeking to belittle the talents of his friends, including D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Woolner. Swinburne, who was much younger than Scott, had received great kindness from him and had been very fond of him (they met initially because the Swinburne family were neighbours of Lady Trevelyan in Northumberland). Scott had advised and helped him with his poetry and Swinburne had affectionately dedicated Poems and Ballads III to Scott, and wrote a moving and substantial verse tribute to him which was published in The Athenaeum shortly after Scott's death in November 1890. In his autobiography, though, Scott tends to treat Swinburne as a delinquent schoolboy. Swinburne responded in 1892 with a piece in the Fortnightly Review which is regularly quoted in accounts of Scott's life. It is tantrum prose, in which Swinburne calls the now dead Scott ‘imbecile, doting, malignant, mangy’ (Walker, 240–41). The anger stirred up in Swinburne and others by Scott's Autobiographical Notes has tended to affect subsequent judgements of the book, and to obscure the fact that it is an indispensable memoir of the early Pre-Raphaelites and of the subsequent lives of the Rossettis, Hunt, Swinburne, Woolner, Munro, and others, and also that it is the central source for an understanding of Lady Trevelyan's princely commission for him to paint the Northumbrian history cycle for Wallington Hall.

John Batchelor

(“Scott, William Bell (1811–1890),” John Batchelor in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, October 2007, Accessed August 31, 2015. www.oxforddnb.com).