DAVID SCOTT ives 
 
 
 

 
 : 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
DAVID SOO ak eo 
 AND HIS WORKS 
 
 WITH A 
 
 CATALOGUE OF HIS PAINTINGS, ENGRAVINGS, 
 AND DESIGNS 
 
 BY 
 
 NE OREN REAR 
 
 AUTHOR OF ‘GEORGE MANSON AND HIS WORKS 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 MDCCCLXXXIV 
 
 All Rights reserved 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
TO 
 
 WILLIAM BELL SCOTT, 
 Painter and Poet, 
 THE BROTHER AND BIOGRAPHER OF DAVID SCOTT, 
 THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED 
 
 WITH DEEP RESPECT. 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 N 
 
 
 
 press our thanks to those who have rendered its 
 
 
 
 offering this volume to the public, we have to ex 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 production possible,—to the surviving friends of David Scott who have given us much information, 
 
 and to the various owners of his works who have afforded us facilities for examining, and, when desired, 
 
 
 
 for reproducing them. In particular we have to thank the Messrs A. & C. Black for permitting us, with 
 the sanction of the author, to use three of the plates which illustrated Mr W. B. Scott’s Memoir of his 
 brother, a volume now out of print and scarce, one to which those most interested in the painter will feel 
 most indebted, and to which the present writer is under especial obligations. By the courtesy of Mr 
 
 Andrew Elliot we have been enabled to reproduce the calotype which forms our final plate ; and we are 
 
 fortunate in having been able to add to our illustrations an unpublished portrait of the father of David 
 
 
 
 Scott, mezzotinted, from a painting by his son, by his pupil Mr John Le Conte, and also the same 
 
 engraver’s important plate of Puck fleeing before the Dawn, from which only a very limited number 
 
 
 
 of impressions have already been issued. 
 The edition of the present work is limited to 100 copies on large paper, and 350 copies on small 
 3 
 
 paper, of which this is No. oO 
 
 Se es 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 Wish OF Mist Ra LUNs: 
 
 BUST OF DAVID SCOTT, RSA, . ; : ‘ : ; . ; , Frontispiece 
 From a cast, in the possession of Mrs Samuel Brown, of the bust, by Sir John Steel, R.S.A., in the National 
 
 Gallery of Scotland. 
 
 
 
 No. 
 PORTRAIT OF ROBERT SCOTT, . : . : a 3 : 0 : 2 
 Unpublished mezzotint by John Le Conte, from an oil-painting by David Scott, in the possession of Mr 
 W. B. Scott. 
 ADAM AND EVE SINGING THEIR MORNING HYMN, : ; : : ‘ p 3 
 Line-engraving from an oil-painting in the possession of Dr J. Le Gay Brereton. 
 NIMROD, THE MIGHTY HUNTER, : : : ; d : : : 2 4 
 From an oil-painting in the possession of Mr William Dickson. 
 OF MAN: SIX MONOGRAMS, 
 “The speech of these things trembleth and is moved.” —Espras. 
 I, OF LIFE, . 3 ; 5 
 
 “Who bringeth forth the living from the dead, and bringeth forth the dead 
 From the living ?” —At Koran. 
 
 Il. OF RELATION, . ; 8 é - 5 3 : e é 6 
 
 ice; and the sun and the moon and the 
 
 
 
 “The night and day to Your sei 
 stars ; and given You dominion over whatever is created for You in the 
 
 earth ; and subjected the sea unto You.” —Au Koran. 
 
 ~I 
 
 Ill. OF KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 « Live you, or are you aught that man may question ?”—SHAKES 
 
 
 
 RE. 
 “ Destruction and Death say we have heard the fame thereof with our 
 ears.’ —Jon. 
 IV. OF INTELLECT, a 3 5 5 ‘ 4 a 5 4 5 8 
 “ Not only to discern 
 Things in their causes but to trace the ways 
 Of highest agents.” —M1L10N. 
 “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”— 
 EcCLESIASTES. 
 vy. OF POWER, ‘ 5 5 “ a 4 A 5 ‘ é ‘ 5 9 
 “ Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, 
 
 
 
 Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.” —Miuton. 
 
 “Why doth one day excel another when as all the light of every day in the 
 
 
 
 year is of the sun?” —Eccumstasticus. 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 10 DAVIN SCOTT, ES 4, 
 
 VI. OF DEATH, : . é A 5 
 “The steps of his strength shall be straitned, and his own counsels shall 
 cast him down; . . . if one know them they are in the terrors 
 
 of the shadow of Death.” —Jox. 
 
 Reproduced from the original etchings by David Scott, on which the above titles and mottoes are inscribed. 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH DEPARTS, AND THE ANGELIC SPIRITS CONDUCT THE 
 SHIP, 
 
 THE ALBATROSS FOLLOWS, 
 
 Reproduced from two of the original etchings by David Scott, illustrative of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. 
 
 THE AGONY OF DISCORD; or, THE HOUSEHOLD GODS DESTROYED, 
 
 
 
 3. Scott from an oil-painting in the possession of Mr James Leathart. 
 THE VINTAGER, 
 Reversed from the oil-painting in the National Gallery of Scotland. 
 
 ARIEL AND CALIBAN, 
 
 From an etching, by W. B. Scott, of an oil-painting in the National Gallery of Scotland. 
 PUCK FLEEING BEFORE THE DAWN, 
 
 Line-engraving by John Le Conte from an oil-painting in the possession of Mr James Campbell. 
 THE TRAITORS GATE, 
 
 From an oil-painting in the possession of Mr R. Carfrae, 
 
 VASCO DE GAMA ROUNDING THE CAPE, 
 
 Etching by W. B. Scott from an oil-painting in the Trinity House, Leith. 
 
 SELF-ACCUSATION; or, MAN AND HIS CONSCI ENCE, 
 Reproduction of a pencil sketch washed with water-colour, by David Scott, in the possession of Mr W. B. 
 
 Scott. 
 
 HOSTS OF ANGELS THAT CRY CONTINUALLY, HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! 
 CHRISTIAN ENTERS THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH, 
 Reproduced from two of the original pencil designs, illustrative of The Pilgrim’s Progress, in the Sunder- 
 land Free Library. 
 THE PROCESSION OF UNKNOWN POWERS, . 
 EMBLEM OF THE ASTRONOMER, 
 THE ALL-SUSTAINING HAND, 
 CREATION OF A STAR, 
 THE COMET, 
 THE FOOTPRINT OF THE OMNIPOTENT, 
 
 HEARING THE ETERNAL MELODIES OF THE SPHERES, 
 Seven designs reproduced from a series of original pencil designs, entitled Man and the Stars, executed as 
 
 illustrations to Professor Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens, and now in the possession of Mr W. B, Scott. 
 
 
 
 PORTRAIT OF DAVID SCOTT, RS.A, 
 
 From a calotype by D, O, Hill, R.S.A., and R, Adamson, 
 
 No. 
 10 
 
 
 
 29 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 DAN al DD etrit COE T ieagcibie rains 
 
 ik 
 
 HALL painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of 
 merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be, as poetry and music are, ele- 
 
 vated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? No, it 
 
 
 
 shall not be so! Painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in im- 
 mortal thoughts.” In these characteristic words of William Blake’s we have in brief and emphatic 
 form his ideal of graphie art, of its scope, and the loftiness of its aim,—an ideal which was also that 
 of David Scott, a painter who deserves to be better known in these days when we begin again to 
 
 feel that imaginative work is precious. 
 
 
 
 But the ideal which Blake’s words expr is by no means universally recognised even now, 
 and was still less widely realised in Blake’s day than in ours. For in the higher and more 
 imaginative departments of graphic art how little has been done in Protestant England, save in 
 quite recent times. Here indeed, as elsewhere, in the days of medievalism, men strove by their 
 art to body forth the things of vision; and the mouldering carvings of our cathedrals still picture 
 
 the wiles of fiends and the triumphs of angels. But since the Reformation the art of England has 
 
 
 
 concerned itself mainly with the sweet and common felicities of domestic and rural life,—has at any 
 rate dealt with the actual, the immediately present, whenever it has dealt with anything effectively. 
 Holbein is the first painter of power working in our country. In his own land he is some- 
 
 thing of the visionary and the idealist,—he draws his Dance of Death, with its weird figures that 
 co] J 2 “ to} 
 
 
 
 close the drama of time and bring in the things that are to be; but the realist is always the 
 
 
 
 better half of him, and round his vision of the Queen of Heaven he gathers his quaint, grave, 
 human company of the Meyer family. He settles in England, and becomes the realist exclusively. 
 The legacy which his life amongst us has bequeathed to the world is his splendid series of portraits 
 of our sixteenth-century men and women. 
 
 Yet while English graphic art was thus barren of the highest imagination, English poetry was 
 soaring into the empyrean, our poets were dealing effectively with themes which in Italy had 
 been common to painting as well as to verse, Chaucer, like Botticelli, dreaming of Spring and her 
 “Menie”; Spenser setting his Virtues and Vices beside those of Giotto in the Temple of Art; and 
 Milton, like Angelo, picturing the wars of Heaven, And even in graphic art there were signs that 
 
 D 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 12 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 our painters felt imagination to be the best and master thing. Fuseli and Haydon strove after it. 
 Reynolds must needs paint nymphs and tragic muses, sweet and stately personalities indeed, but 
 no more divine than was his simple portraiture of the maids and matrons that lived around him. 
 The efforts of these men indicate a struggle after imagination rather than its possession, they 
 simulate a virtue if they have it not; and it can scarcely be said that, until the time of Blake, 
 a single artist has appeared among us whose designs, dealing with the more ideal and imaginative 
 class of subjects, hold and impress the spectator with any very vivid sense of reality, bear any 
 authentic impress of visions actually seen and truly recorded. 
 
 And if all this is true of English, it is still truer of Scottish art. Beginning with portraiture 
 in the hands of Jamesone of Aberdeen, it has been effective always in the portrayal of nature and 
 of man: strong in portraiture, in genre painting, in landscape, it has hardly entered at all the 
 realms of ideal and “visionary conception.” To the main tendencies of the school the works of 
 
 David Scott are a notable exception, and one of the utmost interest, especially when considered in 
 
 
 
 the light of more recent efforts, in the hands of several living British painters, in the direction o 
 imaginative art. 
 
 The pre-Raphaelite movement, dating from 1848, was no less an effort after truth and intensity 
 
 
 
 of sentiment than after accurate portrayal of nature. Poetic and inventive treatment, depth and 
 
 intensity of feeling, expressed by face and figure, are—amid all that may be crude and faultful— 
 
 
 
 at least as apparent as close study of nature and accumulation of varied detail, in Millais’s Car- 
 penter's Shop, Hunt's Awakened Conscience, and Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary. Owing much to the 
 original pre-Raphaelites, and especially influenced by the medieval quaintness and the mystic poetic 
 feeling of Rossetti, is a remarkable group of artists, including Frederick Sandys, M. J. Lawless, and 
 Simeon Solomon. Known most of them as painters, they were more prolific as designers, contributing 
 early in the sixties to ‘Once a Week, ‘Good Words, and occasionally to ‘Cornhill’; and the rough 
 woodcuts of these men will yet be recognised as occupying an important place in the history of 
 imaginative art among us. In our own time we have in Mr Burne-Jones and his followers a fruit- 
 ful school of poetic art. 
 
 The aims and subjects of all these artists have no little kinship with those of Scott; and it is 
 not strange to find Mr Rossetti, in his supplemental chapter to Gilchrist’s ‘ Life of Blake, speaking 
 of the subject of our volume—*a great though yet imperfectly acknowledged name ”—as “ the painter 
 most nearly fulfilling the highest requirements for historic art, both as a thinker and a colourist, 
 who has appeared among us from the time of Hogarth to his own.” 
 
 In Scott, in Rossetti himself, and in Blake, we find the same variety as to method; they are 
 no specialists in the means by which they express themselves: they work in water-colour, oil, or 
 fresco; they handle the graver or the etching-needle, nay, the pen also, for prose or verse; all 
 pointing to the fact that with them the subject—the truth to be stated, the vision to be recorded— 
 is the main and master thing, the means being changed from time to time, that being selected 
 which, at the moment, is best suited for the embodiment of the present thought. 
 
 Another characteristic of the art of these painters, and indeed of imaginative artists generally, 
 and very markedly of Mr Burne-Jones, is their imperfect mastery over form. It is so with the 
 splendidly imaginative work of the early Italians, so too with the vivid carvings of our Northern 
 Gothic. And the reason is not far to seek. The forms of this kind of art can be at best only 
 
 pregnant symbols, not perfect realisations, A suggestive sign these men can give, but not the very 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 13 
 
 thing itself which they have seen with their inner eye. The models of the painters of the actual 
 will stay while they trace them line by line,—but how for those who paint dreams and visions, 
 of which a shadow passed before them, but they knew not the shape thereof? With such men, 
 
 almost invariably, the colour sense is present far more powerfully than the command over form, the 
 
 
 
 gift of colour being perhaps the most instinctive and inborn of all the artist's endowments—a thing 
 of original make and structure, given or withheld — while perception of form seems to be more 
 distinctly a matter of study and experience. But it is to be noted that when one of these painters 
 
 is working upon any part of his canvas which is vitally concerned with the sentiment of his 
 
 
 
 picture —a face for instance, and its expression —he seems always roused to put forth his full 
 strength ; and such parts, the subtlest and most complicated, which would be the stumbling-blocks 
 of ordinary artists, become with these more imaginative men the very points of most signal technical 
 
 triumph. 
 
 Wh, 
 
 These few general remarks on imaginative art bring us to the special subject of our paper. 
 David Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1806, coming of a family that could count their descent back 
 for several generations through ancestors of a stout burgher sort. His actual birthplace was in the 
 centre of the city, in the “ Parliament Stairs,” a block of buildings in the High Street, destroyed by 
 fire some fifty years ago, but similar in character to those other antique “lands” near its site whose 
 altitude still impresses the stranger. While he was young the family removed to St Leonards, now 
 a dingy quarter of the city filled with coal-depots, then a pleasant suburb redolent of the country, 
 
 and settled in an old house enclosed by holly hedges, shaded by alder and lime trees, and full in 
 
 
 
 view of Salisbury Crags, and the green slopes and grey and rosy rocks of Arthur Seat. The birth- 
 
 place, however, in the historic heart of the city, was retained as the workshop of the father of the 
 
 
 
 family,! who was an engraver; and it formed a kind of El Dorado or wonderland to the children, 
 
 
 
 one portion of it filled with the bustle of busy labour and wonders of homely art, but with strange 
 
 
 
 winding passages in it leading to disused lumber-rooms—wainscoted chambers filled with old dusty 
 
 
 
 law-papers, among which prizes of seals and armorial bearings were occasionally to be discovered. 
 The place seems to have made a strong impression on their imagination. William Scott, writing 
 
 nearly half a century afterwards, says he feels as if he ‘were describing some recess in a guild in 
 
 
 
 Nuremburg” rather than a prosaic ttish house. About the home itself there always hung 
 something of gloom and sadness. The father was of grave temperament, deeply and sombrely 
 religious, suffering too from feeble and broken health. Four sons, all of them older than David, 
 had been removed by death; and the mother, her thoughts brooding upon those who were gone, 
 would often address the living children by the names of the dead. All the surroundings tended 
 
 to confirm and intensify the naturally grave and earnest disposition of the lad. There seems, 
 
 
 
 indeed, to have been one thoroughly cheerful and natural personality in the house — “ uncle 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 George””—a hale old man, genial and merry-hearted, greatly interested in field-sports, keeping his 
 set of pointers and setters and his flight of pigeons, and coming, as we can well believe, like a 
 
 very godsend to the younger members of the family. 
 
 
 
 1 A portrait of Robert Scott, from a painting by his son, forms our illustration, No 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 14 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 Several characteristic anecdotes of these childish days have been preserved. One, indicating how 
 _keen was Scott’s sense for beauty even at a very early age, he has himself recorded. “ He went 
 
 into a company assembled in the principal room of the house, and making his way up to a young 
 lady laid his hand on her knees and said, ‘You are very beautiful.’ There are more things in the 
 world than there are faces among women to which he could now look up and say the same.” 
 Another anecdote shows how strongly nervous and imaginative his temperament was. Ghost-stories 
 had been going the round of the nursery, and the children were much exercised with unseen terrors. 
 David, the eldest, to frighten the rest, fashioned a bolster, a sheet, and a mask into the semblance 
 of a ghost; but no sooner had he raised it into an erect position than he was filled with horror 
 of the Frankenstein which his own hands had created, and alarmed the house with his piercing 
 screams. 
 
 As he grew older his mind was greatly occupied with theology,—debating questions of “ provi- 
 dence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,” and composing “ Odes on Death,” and other verses on kindred 
 subjects: then, even as to the very end, the unseen world was pressing on him and engaging his 
 imagination. Among the books in his father’s library was a copy of Blair's ‘Grave, with Blake's 
 illustrations, and the plates had doubtless their own important share in forming the boy’s artistic 
 taste. His interest in the volume is testified by a long manuscript note, which he appended to it 
 many years after. 
 
 The time speedily arrived when Scott must choose a profession ; and owing to the failing health 
 of his father, it was in the last degree desirable that he should take to engraving. But the 
 laborious, minute, painstaking nature of the paternal art was little to his liking; and, above all, 
 the youth could ill consent to spend day after day slowly copying the tame designs of others— 
 he whose imagination was teeming all the while with visions that burned for expression. He con- 
 tinued the uncongenial occupation only for a few years, and by the time he was twenty had thrown 
 it aside altogether, and become a painter. 
 
 We have proof of his devotion to study in his efforts, along with Macnee, J. A. Hutchison, 
 Steell, and other artists, to found a class for painting from the life, and to obtain permission to 
 draw from the gallery of casts in the Trustees’ Academy ;' while under Dr Monro he made himself 
 acquainted with anatomy, and thus sought to probe the more hidden secrets of the human frame. 
 In 1829 he was elected a member of the then recently founded Scottish Academy, which obtained 
 its royal charter eight years later. His first exhibited picture was Zhe Hopes of Early Gentus 
 dispelled by Death, shown in 1828; and among his other early works may be mentioned Cain, 
 Nimrod, The Death of Sappho, Wallace defending Scotland, Adam and Eve singing their Morning 
 Hymn, and Sarpedon carried by Death and Sleep. 
 
 The Nimrod,’ in particular, may he identified with this period of the artist’s youth; it was 
 painted in 1831. We may regard it as a kind of personification and apotheosis of physical life 
 and vigour. The large upright canvas is filled with the form of the mighty hunter, which alone 
 arrests the eye, relieved against an expanse of firmament with its rifted flakes of rosy clouds that 
 scatter before the dawn. The figure stands erect, naked but for the cincture of tiger-skin at the 
 loins and the purple drapery which flutters from the shoulders. The feet, set well apart, rest on 
 masses of rock that are just seen at the foot of the canvas; for the man seems to stand on some 
 
 1 The Scottish School of Art, under the control of the Board of Trustees for Manufactures in Scotland. 
 2 Tilustration, No, 3. 3 [lustration, No, 4. 
 
 
 
 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 15 
 
 mountain-top, on the very apex of the world, heaved high as earth can carry him. His right hand 
 holds a spear; the left raises to the mouth a great ram’s horn, whose wild notes fill the morning 
 air. At his feet lies a fawn, pierced with a javelin, and bleeding to death,—a type of the suffering 
 which the merely natural life, the life of instinctive and unrestrained impulse, gathers around it. 
 
 It is interesting to compare the Sarpedon of Scott with Mr W. B. Richmond’s rendering of 
 the same subject, exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery of 1879. In the English artist’s great canvas 
 of blue monochrome, we have academic skill and finish, and an impressive sense of amplitude in 
 the moonlit space of sky and sea, against which is seen the downward sweep of the spirits that 
 bear the dead hero. In Scott’s picture the grim presences loom out from the blackness of a night 
 swept clear of moon and stars, a darkness dense, and that could be felt; yet the work is full of 
 colour—in the pallor of death, the rosy flesh-tints of sleep, and the dark crimson poppies of his 
 chaplet. There is a weird and tragic power in this conception of the three figures, their limbs 
 twining and involved, their bodies pressed each to each, as though Sleep and Death, and the man 
 
 they carry, had become indeed one flesh. 
 
 Ill. 
 
 During these years the command over the acid and the metal plate which Scott had acquired 
 in the workshop of his father was turned to good account in the production and publication of origi- 
 nal designs, executed in a free and artistic spirit. The Monograms of Man, the first series of these 
 etchings, were issued in 1831, drawn by the artist on the copper in delicate outline. The bold- 
 ness and directness of their symbolism, the simple way in which they deal with the profoundest 
 subjects, has no parallel in art, except in the works of the early Italians, and in those of Blake and 
 Durer. 
 
 In the first design a mighty hand calls into existence by its touch the sun and moon in the 
 firmament, and man, who is stretched supine upon the globe of the earth. In the second, we see 
 the full-developed human being, and the whole round of things ministering to him. “He stands, 
 like the angel in the Apocalypse, one foot upon the sea and the other upon the earth,” his arms 
 wide extended, the ether ensphering his naked body, and his head crowned with the full-orbed sun. 
 In the next design, an attenuated figure rises out of the ground, the grey hair waving in sparse 
 flakes on his forehead, and a wild look of madness in his eyes and his bitter half-opened mouth. 
 Laying his lean hand upon the head of a youth, he forces him to contemplate a grinning skull. The 
 winged caduceus which the mortal holds in his hand is shivering in pieces beneath him, and through 
 horror of this sight of decay and corruption as the end of all the very heavens above seem to rock 
 to their ruin, the sun bursting into fragments, and the stars falling like untimely fruit. In the 
 fourth plate we see, far beneath, a man standing on the orb of the earth, his feet firmly rooted there, 
 a mortal prisoned by time and space, yet sending his spirit——imaged as a long - haired gigantic 
 figure—forth on an arrow-like flight in quest of the great mist-shrouded Presence, who holds in his 
 hand the fire and the rain, who is the life of all that live. Again, we have Fate, a huge form 
 turned from us, the head bowed, the face hidden. With his powerful right hand he presses one 
 
 1 Tilustrations, Nos, 5-10, 
 
 E 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 16 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 mortal to the earth, with his left arm he sustains a second, who, in his turn, stretches his sceptre 
 over his prostrate brother ; ‘but the neck of this very Fate is bound by that great chain whose 
 links encircle slayer and slain, and encompass the round of the globe itself. Then we have the 
 last scene of all. Man, grown old and dying, spite of his clinging hands is slowly and surely 
 sliding from the solid rock of mortal life into the vague misty sea—the “world not realised ”— 
 towards which he gazes so fearfully, and from which there comes a hand, girt with the serpent- 
 circle of eternity, and holding the cup of which all must drink. The very garments of the man 
 are falling from him, leaving him unclothed. Around are gathered the representatives of the 
 world’s religions: the Mohammedan with his crescent; the Parsee with his censer; the monk with 
 cross and uplifted keys; while in front, “the naked intellectual man” lifts his head from long 
 study, and confesses his darkness by covering his eyes and laying his finger on his lips. In exam- 
 ining this noble series of designs, so full of profound thought which halts sometimes in its technical 
 expression, it should be borne in mind that they were the production of a youth of twenty-five. 
 Shortly after the publication of the Monograms, in the winter of 1831-32, Scott employed his 
 evenings in sketching a series of twenty-five “poetic and dramatic scenes,” illustrative of Coleridge’s 
 “ Ancient Mariner,” which, however, were not published till five years after. In these designs the 
 drawing is even more glaringly defective than in the former series, and necessarily, the thought is 
 less absolutely original. We find in them little of the beawty of Coleridge’s poem, with its rose-red 
 bride, its crimson shadows of the spirit-men, and its ice “green as emerald.” Scott gives us little 
 grace of line or form to set against all this exquisiteness of colour. And for the “ happy living 
 things” whose beauty no tongue might declare, “God's creatures of the great calm” whose every 
 track on the ocean was a “flash of golden fire,” the artist shows only putrescent horrors, as of a 
 magnified drop of water. Beauty of form and free grace of springing flight we do get in the 
 ascending figure seen against the long horizon line of quiet sea, in that twenty-first design,! where 
 “the spirit of the south departs, and angelic spirits conduct the ship.” In the fourth plate,? too, 
 there is much sense of motion and sharp salt breeze in the sunlight weather and the glancing ocean 
 that surround the floating icebergs, and exquisite litheness of attitude in the figure of the seaman 
 who leans from the ship's bulwarks, extending his arm to feed the following albatross. And if 
 the beauty of the poem does not find fullest exposition in the designs, its weirdness, its sense of 
 supernatural terror, is given most powerfully in the spell-bound stare of the wedding-guest ; in the 
 spectral ribs of the phantom ship and its loathsome crew; in the form of the mariner bent upon 
 the deck as the level procession of the dead crosses his face, their bodies, stiff and stark, converging 
 around him as though dumbly pointing to their murderer; or, again, kneeling as the lightning 
 flashes around him, and the rain-deluge pours from heaven: till at length the last design—All is 
 Absolved—telieves us from the accumulated terror, with its cool cathedral interior, where even 
 
 death is beautiful with carvings of quiet faces, and folded palms, and winged watchers, and its 
 
 
 
 symmetrical circle of bowed worshippers who kneel for priestly benediction, while over them, com- 
 ing from the withdrawn and unseen recess of the altar, we “perceive the waving of the hands that 
 bless.” 
 
 It is interesting to compare this series with Sir Noel Paton’s exquisite illustrations to the same 
 poem, which are strong precisely in the very points in which Scott’s are weak. Those by the 
 living painter are full of grace and beauty, learned and elaborate in costume, refined in feature ; 
 
 1 Tllustration, No. 11. 2 Tilustration, No. 12. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 HIS LIFE AND WORKS. a7, 
 
 yet they scarcely 
 
 
 
 except in one splendid plate, Zhe Seraph Band—convey, as do Scott's rude 
 designs, an overpowering and enthralling sense of the supernatural. The difference between the two 
 series will be felt very accurately if we compare the two renderings of The Phantom Ship. In Sir 
 Noel’s design, Death has only the terror of skeleton form and veiled unseen face; and the Life-in- 
 Death is a fair woman, stamped as vile only by the darkened circles round the wild eyes, and the 
 long hair which bickers agaist the sky like flames of fire. From these the artist turns to dwell 
 with manifest delight upon the picturesque details of the ancient ship, its broken and rotting 
 timbers, and their rich accretion of trailing sea-weed and encrusting shells. But Scott’s vessel is 
 no human ship, fashioned by men, and once their habitation ; it has been shaped by witchery for its 
 loathsome crew; its black ribs, through which the sun doth “peer as through a grate,” are square 
 and fresh as if carved yesterday: and of those it carries, one is a deformed and writhing woman- 
 shape, the other no thing of whitened bones that have grown peaceful in the sepulchre, but a very 
 spirit of corruption and decay, the mouldering cerements clinging round his attenuated limbs, his 
 skull-face seen in unveiled horror,—a spirit before whose touch all mortals are like the empheris 
 that creeps along the sharpened edge of his scythe. 
 
 The pictures which we have already mentioned include the most important of those executed 
 
 by Scott before his visit to Italy in 1832, Ten years before he had been in London, standing long 
 
 
 
 and eagerly, till the hour for admi 
 
 
 
 on, at the unopened doors of the Royal Academy; admiring 
 Martin’s grandiose Nineveh ; praising, cautiously and with reserve, Haydon’s Entry of Christ into 
 Jerusalem ; and visiting Turner’s studio, where he was pounced upon by the irate genius of the 
 place for making a surreptitious sketch of one of the pictures on a card. Doubtless, also, he had 
 learned something from the two large pictures by Etty, exhibited in Edinburgh in 1831, and pur- 
 chased by the Royal Scottish Academy in the following year. They were fitted to teach a young 
 artist much regarding design on a large scale, and their colour would come to him as a foretaste of 
 
 the splendid hues which he was afterwards to see in Venice. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The visit to Italy was his first experience of foreign travel, and his last, if we except a short 
 stay in Paris with his brother in 1837. At the present time he spent a week in that city, greatly 
 impressed among the works of the moderns with the pictures of David, “a very great artist” ; 
 rightly praising his “learned talent,’ “his revived mode of study,’ which has done so much to 
 recall the art of France and Belgium, and through it that of our own country, to an accurate per- 
 ception and portrayal of form. © 
 
 From Paris he passes to Geneva, and across the Simplon; Chillon and Coligny are seen through 
 the poetic glamour which Byron had cast around them; and the canvases of Italy rise before him 
 in the distance, gorgeous to the eye of his imagination as morning clouds. Milan, Venice—where 
 he stayed about a month—Bologna, Florence, and Siena were visited; and in December he settled 
 in Rome, where he remained some fifteen months, his stay broken only by a short visit to Naples 
 and Pompeii. 
 
 The physical conditions of the time were far from enviable. His diary records perpetual 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 18 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.Ax 
 
 changes from studio to studio, with the necessary accompaniments of discomfort and interruptions to 
 work, Once he narrowly escaped being shot in the streets by an assassin. But the feeble and 
 uncertain state of his health was a still more serious source of uneasiness; and resulting in part 
 from this, but still more from the artist’s nervous and over-sensitive constitution of mind as well 
 as body, there were hours and days of blackness and despair, when the search for excellence was a 
 kind of agony, when the art that had been his god seemed to have become a tormenting fiend. 
 No wonder that Scott had his fits of nostalgia and longing for home, that he wearied for the 
 security and quiet of the parental nest, even for “ those old Sunday evenings, and the books” which 
 occupied them, and which had perhaps been found sufficiently tedious when they were a present 
 reality. His letters of this period, his biographer tells us, are for the most part “bitter or sad, 
 painfully obscure or rising in rebellion with society and its conventions, with nature and its laws,— 
 even with his own soul and the divine voice.” It is the old story of a man quarrelling with the 
 bars of his appointed cage,—the old tale of “infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that 
 yearn.” 
 
 Less than most art-students in Rome was Scott a beginner and’a learner. He was twenty-six 
 now, and had already produced works of solid worth, both as regards thought and handling. The 
 study of his growth as a painter is greatly complicated by the fact that, most of his earlier pictures, 
 remaining unsold in his studio, were worked upon again and again, at widely different inter- 
 vals; but it is quite certain that the technique of his art, as well as the imagination which that 
 technique expressed, was far less a thing of gradual and orderly growth from youth to fully developed 
 manhood, than one of sudden impulse and effort—a thing of the mood and the moment. His earlier 
 paintings have qualities that would not discredit those of his latest period: the productions of his 
 very last years are as full as those of his youth of glaring and inveterate errors of form. 
 
 In the works of the moderns around him he found little indeed to admire, they seemed dead 
 alike in thought and method. When a Roman artist praised his Monograms of Man for their 
 invention, he could scarcely suppress his wonder that such a quality should be considered by a 
 modern Italian as at all necessary or desirable in a work of art. Even in the productions of the 
 great periods, he found mainly skill of handling and technical power, little of the high aim which, 
 for him, was the soul and savour of art. ‘‘ Upon the whole,” he writes, “there is nothing over- 
 whelming. I had always judged painting by its sentiment, its mental bearing, and thought most 
 of invention and new spheres of meaning. What is to be seen here to fulfil what painting ought 
 to, and can, perform? Nothing. Titian is an old man without imagination in all his works; 
 Tintoretto a blind Polyphemus; Veronese a doge’s page.” Yet, when he returned to England, and 
 saw the flimsy art which was there in vogue, he was forced to confess that in Italy he “had been 
 conversing with stern, strong, and correct men.” He seems to have given scarcely any serious 
 study to the painters of the fifteenth century. He indeed says vaguely that “the elder masters 
 are venerable, stern, and true;” but Giovanni Bellini and Mantegna are the earliest to whom he 
 definitely refers with any measure of praise; and the latter he only calls “a true genius in the 
 fettered time of art.” Had he examined with care, he would have found, amid all the quaintness 
 and imperfection of the early masters, no lack of the thought, invention, and imagination which he 
 sought for in vain among the splendid canyases of a later time—but thought and invention scarcely 
 akin to his own. With him, thought is expressed by rapid motion and striking attitude; with 
 
 them, a gentle quietude is shed over every saintly face and every smiling landscape. The time for 
 
 
 
 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 19 
 
 2 
 
 the admiration of ‘the Primitives” was not yet, and Scott was hardly the man to profit by the 
 calm lessons which they might have taught. He seems to have been most impressed by Michael 
 Angelo and Caravaggio, recognising in their impetuous force something that was germane to himself. 
 His own style was certainly strongly influenced by his study of the former master. 
 
 Scott spent little of his time in copying; we hear, indeed, of only one work of this sort, a 
 transcript of Angelo’s Delphic Sibyl. Sketches and studies he made in plenty, especially from 
 groups of Zhe Last Judgment in the Sistine; but he desired mainly that the art of old Italy should 
 be round him like a bracing atmosphere, to stimulate and aid him in the free and original production 
 of works of a like power, and to be assimilated and made his own less in the manual way of transcript 
 
 than by the surer and more intellectual one of intelligent study and observation. His drawings from 
 
 the life in oils and chalk numbered 137; and in the Hospital d’Incurabile he turned again to 
 
 
 
 anatomy, producing eleven sheets of elaborate diagrams. The chief pictures dating from Rome 
 are, The Agony of Discord or The Houschold Gods Destroyed, Sappho and Anacreon, four 
 paintings of The Periods of the Day, and The Vintager. 
 
 The first of these works, a symbol of “the old order changing, yielding place to the new,” is the 
 most important example of the artist’s earlier period. He regarded it as the main artistic result of 
 his stay in Italy, and carefully worked upon it at two separate times after his return. The gloom 
 that enwraps the canvas is the fitting environment of the wild scene that is being enacted in its 
 midst. A family have risen in wrath against their head, and are fiercely dragging him from the 
 seat whence he has exercised rule and authority. Old, blind, and all but overpowered, he still 
 struggles for mastery. One youth, of debased and distorted feature, seizes his left limb in furious 
 and wanton rage—personating the evil and foolish spirit of change; but the noble elder son does 
 not even touch the falling man, but kneeling, with outstretched arm and uplifted finger he charges 
 him with impiety and turpitude. Clinging around the head of the house are the women, “ perplext 
 with fear of change,” hardly knowing on which side to range themselves, but mainly holding by the 
 old man; while beside them, unnoticed and unregarded, lies an infant,—type of the unsuspected new 
 age, which in its turn will supersede the now victorious combatants. Beneath, broken and headless, 
 is an image of wood, a god that was no god, which had been raised for worship; in front a censer 
 of fire flames fiercely, like the passion of the living actors in the tragedy; and in the distance nature 
 herself, in her labouring volcano and destroying lightning, seems to echo and repeat the human 
 tumult. Even this slight verbal sketch is sufficient to show how full the picture is of subtle thought 
 and invention. Its technical workmanship is certainly not wanting in the artist’s usual defects, yet 
 it must be conceded that it shows, especially im the struggling principal figure, something of Angelesque 
 power. Scott himself, who greatly valued the picture, was fond of finding in it some likeness to Greek 
 sculpture, comparing it to the Laocoon. 
 
 The Four Periods of the Day recall the similar title of a series of engravings by Hogarth. 
 But in the title the likeness begins and ends. For the shrewd realist of the eighteenth century 
 the interest of the world is centred in its humanity; for him the four periods of the day mean 
 what men and women are doing at morning, noon, evening, and night. Other painters have 
 affixed the names to mere landscape transcripts, thinking only of the various effects of the hour 
 on the woods and hills, the streams and trees of earth. But Scott, like Mr Burne-Jones in his 
 Night and Day, has striven to suggest, by “one form with its single act,” the full meaning and 
 
 1 Tllustration, No. 13. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 LP TA NEN Mo 
 
 20 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 significance of the time,—to set on canvas some shadow and symbol of that spirit and presence 
 which rules over the hour, and sheds alike on man and nature an exulting joy or a peaceful calm. 
 
 In Scott's design the spirit of the Morning is seen as a female figure appearing from behind 
 mountain-tops, her body poised as though about to ascend the sky. With her raised hands she 
 flings off the rosy mantle which is her only covering; and the painter has marked the meaning 
 of this robe by making the extremity of its folds mingle with the purple and grey of the upper 
 sky, which below is flecked with ruddy clouds, and fades through delicate green into a clear yellow, 
 against which is defined the grey range of distant hills, In a smaller but not less poetic version 
 of the subject, the impersonation of Morning is borne aloft on the wings of a butterfly, delicate 
 white wings, spotted with black and crimson. The figure fronts us, the body thrown backwards, 
 the loins circled by yellow drapery, which floats freely behind; the head, with its long black 
 hair flowing on either side, is raised, and the eyes gaze upwards into the depths of blue sky, that 
 fades softly into delicate warm yellow, against which is relieved a green corner of the earth, with its 
 many -coloured flowers opening in the light. Noon is represented by a brown-skinned, red-girt 
 man, alighted on a floating mass of white clouds. The blaze of the sun strikes vertically upon him 
 through the blue atmosphere; his head is crowned with gold, and his hand holds aloft a sceptre. 
 The next design, Evening, is the quaintest of the series. The whole canvas is suffused with a dusky 
 ruddy tone; the warmth of the sky passes into yellow towards the zenith, where two long level 
 lines of cloud bar its breadth; and the dark leaves, buds, and flowers of a rose, which springs from 
 an unseen foreground, are struck sharply across its clearness. In the midst of all, the spirit of 
 the hour appears as a male child, who is carried through the air standing on the back of a huge 
 moth. This work may be regarded as the precursor of Puck, Ariel and Caliban, and the similar 
 pictures of the artist, with all their quaintness and all their poetry. In Night a female figure floats 
 through the dark-blue air; her head is bowed, the face gazes downwards, and the hands, which 
 eross over the head, sustain the black drapery that partly covers her and is girt at the loins with 
 a golden girdle. The body, naked for the most part, shines pallid against the sky of night, which 
 is alive with keen star-points. The extended feet touch gently a long band of white clouds; to the 
 left is the yellow crescent moon, and beneath a dark sea with faintly glimmering lights wandering 
 over it, and the steady glow of a pharos. 
 
 The life-sized figure of The Vintager1 is one of the examples of the artist preserved in the 
 Scottish National Gallery. In its largeness of handling, its comparative flatness and want of 
 projection, its calculated opposition of full and but slightly gradated colour, and in the abstract 
 treatment of such of the accessories as the vine leafage, it contrasts strangely with the modern and 
 Renaissant art beside which it hangs, and seems like a work from some very far off country and 
 time. The peculiarity of its treatment is probably due in great part to the artist’s experiments in 
 fresco - painting, made during his stay in Rome; certainly both in feeling and in handling it has 
 many of the characteristics proper to that technical method. 
 
 The Sappho and Anacreon, a piece of strong masculine colour, is a scene of feast and revelry, 
 a triumph of the glowing things of sense. The white-skinned poetess, clasped by the brown vine- 
 crowned Anacreon, holds aloft her lyre. The scene is a pavilion, richly hung with crimson 
 curtains, and open overhead to the blue. On the floor are strewed shed roses and other blossoms, 
 an emptied wine-goblet, and a flute untouched of finger. And if we ask, “ What of the end?” there 
 
 ” Illustration, No. 14. 
 
 
 
 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 21 
 
 seems some hint of solemn warning in the beautiful grave face of the Cupid to the left, and in the 
 long upright line of sky that is seen beside him growing keen and pale towards evening, and 
 
 pierced by the dark finger of a single poplar. 
 
 We 
 
 We may here speak of Scott’s writings on art; for, though the composition of the papers which 
 he contributed to ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’ was probably not begun till some four or five years 
 after his return from Italy, they very definitely owe their existence and their material to his 
 foreign experiences. About 1838 he etched, in a broad bold style, and in the “soft ground ” 
 method, a series of large subjects from Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment, intending to publish them 
 along with a paper on “The Peculiarities of Thought and Style” displayed in the work. But he 
 was unable to find a publisher willing to place his undertaking before the public, so the original 
 idea was abandoned; and in February 1839, the letterpress which he had prepared appeared in the 
 pages of ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ where it was followed in June 1839, in January and August 1840, and 
 in March 1841, by articles on Raphael, Titian, Leonardo, the Caracci, and Caravaggio. Unlike most 
 of the criticism that comes from painters, these essays are far more occupied with the spirit and 
 motives of art than with the media of its expression. The author complains that “the spirit, the 
 vivida vis animi which distinguishes different periods and different schools of art, one from the 
 other, has been placed in lines and tints; and its law, which led to the adoption or rejection, the 
 selection and combination of these, has remained unnoticed. Its vehicula, like the cover of an 
 Egyptian two thousand years dead, has been looked to for all that was to characterise it — the 
 chrysalis shell mistaken for the living psyche, which floated unobserved overhead.” He seeks in 
 each picture for the mood of mind which conditions its mode of expression, from which in the 
 artist himself it proceeded, to which in the spectator it appeals; and he finds that art is “pro- 
 duced in abeyance to intellect by Michael Angelo, to morals by Raphael, and to impressions of 
 sense by Titian.” Very strongly does he insist that method and technique — that colour, for 
 instance — must never be criticised as something apart and absolute, but always with reference to 
 subject, and to the spirit which inspires that subject, and that “the laws of no particular time 
 
 2 
 
 should be imposed as the idea of those of another;” that “each has its separate sphere in relation 
 to the wide development of mind and quality, which, from age to age, passes on, changing and 
 producing :” his meaning being probably much the same as was Blake’s when he said, long before, 
 that among the masters of art, as in the kingdom of heaven, there is no greater or less, all are equal. 
 
 A sixth paper was projected and commenced, but it remained a fragment, and was first published 
 in 1850 as a supplementary chapter to the Memoir by Mr W. B. Scott. It deals with ‘“ Rubens, 
 his Contemporaries, and Modern Painters.” In finish and clearness its style contrasts very favour- 
 ably with that of the preceding articles, Its author looks on the Fleming as the first great modern 
 who expressed himself through art, free from the fetters of medieval and Renaissant times; and 
 he deprecates, as again in a later pamphlet, any such feeble and dilettante efforts to invest art with 
 the mere externals of a dead and buried past as were visible in the productions of the modern 
 
 German school. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 22 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 In addition to these papers we have many detached notes on art, and a foreign journal which, 
 though it possesses some general interest from the keen observation it shows of men and things, is 
 mainly valuable for its remarks on Italian painting. At the same time Scott wrote a good deal of 
 verse, and algo, as his brother informs us, several prose tales. Of these latter, as of “the much 
 valued poem ‘Trafalgar’ ” we have no extracts in the Memoir. It would have. been interesting to 
 know what narrative power their author possessed—how he managed that sequence of events which 
 the painter, prisoned to the moment of his choice, can only hint at. One striking and individual 
 fragment of imaginative literature by Scott appeared in ‘The Edinburgh University Souvenir, —a 
 little volume, now somewhat scarce, which was edited by the late W. A. C. Shand, and published 
 in 1835. The paper, entitled ““A Dream of my Studio,” is a vision of the artists who had been 
 
 his predecessors in his Roman painting-room—of their lives, and their various efforts and aspirations. 
 
 VI. 
 
 We now find our artist at the age of nearly twenty-eight, returning to his native city, there to 
 continue, amid much that was conflicting in himself and much that was discouraging in his sur- 
 roundings, the production of that long series of high-pitched works which is associated with his name. 
 In spite of his manner, which was somewhat cold and self-centred, and was apt to be repellent to 
 strangers, he gradually drew to himself a few of the best and most thoughtful of his fellow-citizens, 
 and won the hearty respect of the other members of the Scottish Academy, however little appreci- 
 ative some of these latter might be of the aims of his art. Dr Samuel Brown the chemist, in 
 particular, was one of his closest friends, the splendidly imaginative man of science finding very 
 close spiritual kinship in the imaginative painter. He deserves to be especially mentioned, along 
 with the Rev. J. Fairbairn, and a still surviving friend the Rev. Dr Simpson of Derby, for his 
 steady advocacy of Scott’s art at a time when the press generally was either indifferent to it or 
 definitely hostile. To these may be added the names of the late Professor John P. Nichol of Glasgow, 
 Mr John Dunlop of Brockloch, the Rev. George Gilfillan, and of Dr Alexander Jackson and Mr 
 Cormack Brown, from the survivors of whom we have received interesting particulars regarding the 
 life and personality of Scott. Haydon and other English artists, whose professional aims Scott most 
 appreciated, would visit him from time to time; and strangers came to him from over-seas even— 
 Margaret Fuller, after spending a morning in his painting-room, exclaiming enthusiastically, “ They told 
 me he was cold, but he is as ardent as man can be.” She records in a letter that she had seen in Edin- 
 burgh “a man—an artist—severe and antique in his spirit: he seemed burdened by the sorrow of 
 aspiration, yet very calm, as secure in the justice of fate.” Emerson, too, was the friend of this 
 “man of high character and genius,” as he calls him in his ‘English Traits’ On leaving for 
 America, he wrote Scott,—‘‘I carry with me a bright image of your house and studio, and all 
 your immortal companions therein, and I wish to keep the ways open between us, natural and 
 supernatural. If the Good Power had allowed me the opportunity of seeing you more at leisure, 
 and of comparing notes of past years a little! And it may yet be allowed in time. But where 
 and when?” During Emerson’s stay in Edinburgh, Scott painted his portrait, the figure standing 
 
 erect, young and vigorous, the head circled with a delicate changeful iris. His portrait of Dr 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 HIS LIFE AND WORKS 
 
 
 
 23 
 
 Samuel Brown is especially solemn and striking, its head, a little larger than life, with its long 
 dark hair, set against the sky of night and the shine of stars. At another time we find Scott 
 engaged upon a likeness of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe; and the sale cataloeue of that most fastidious 
 collector—the Scottish Walpole, as he has been justly called, who thought twice before he gave the 
 name of artist to any one—contained several of the painter's sketches for his principal works. It is 
 remarkable that so many of Scott’s most intimate friends, so many of the warmest admirers of his 
 pictures, were men of mark in other departments of human effort than the arts; and the fact indi- 
 cates the wide range of the man’s mind, the wide radius of its influence. Yet the appreciation of 
 his works by artists themselves, and by artists whose own subjects and methods are quite other 
 than those of Scott, proves that he was not a mere dilettante, expressing himself in a medium over 
 which he had no mastery, but a capable craftsman, possessing, with all his occasional defects, a 
 
 singular command of both form and colour. 
 
 
 
 And so he lived his life, sadness becoming, year by year, more and more interwoven with it. 
 
 It was filled enough with failures of the more palpable and visible sort,—failure, as we shall see, at 
 
 ct 
 
 1e Westminster Hall competitions; failure, on two occasions, to secure a post as teacher in the 
 
 Trustees’ Academy ; failures not infrequent in the sale of his pictures; and failure always to obtain 
 
 fs 
 
 he full sympathy and appreciation which he craved for his art. Love came to him, but came only 
 to vanish, crossing his life with too brief radiance, like the white-robed Hope passing over the 
 Sky of Adversity in his latest picture. And yet, no doubt, quite the deepest and most real cause 
 
 of his sadness lay in himself, in his own unsatisfied, unsatisfiable nature, in the wide and peculiar 
 
 Hw 
 
 ange of his art, an art whose conceptions can never be fully compassed, can only be suggested on 
 
 
 
 ct 
 
 ne canvas, in which “the incomplete, more than completion, matches the immense,” and which 
 can carry its message only to those who will receive it with open and sympathetic mind. There 
 was wanting to him that calmness and perfect faith which gave such a gladness and beauty to the 
 life of Blake. The mind of Scott was one in which the familiar and homely things of life were 
 apt to be disregarded for its larger aims; over which the chances and changes that time brings, its 
 sorrows and its joys, were apt to pass little regarded, except in so far as they bore upon the great 
 and impersonal ambition. He was a man in whom the affection for kindred and those about him 
 tended to assert itself seldom and in bursts of sudden intensity, rather than with quiet and constant 
 presence, still and helpful like household fire. His earnest nature was wanting in flexibility; he 
 could not readily adapt himself to his surroundings—could not for a time throw off his own indi- 
 vidual and pressing concerns, and recreate himself in company, with the common cares and varied 
 trivial interests which it brings. So for him more and more his studio came to be his world; he 
 was busied there from morning to night with pencil or pen, leading, far more exclusively than 
 most artists, the purely intellectual life. 
 
 On his return to his native city there came to Scott a period of some doubt and hesitancy. 
 Tis old Italian life was over, leaving him indeed with experience and added skill; but how was he 
 to begin the new life of work at home? how was he to employ the skill which he had gained ? 
 There was some prospect of his being commissioned by the Board of Trustees in Edinburgh to paint 
 the roof of their Academy with subjects from the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, —a monu- 
 mental work such as he had in view when he learned the processes of fresco in Italy, and one upon 
 which he could have entered heart and soul. The project was warmly urged by Andrew Wilson, 
 Scott’s old master in the School—a man who deserves well of Scottish art, not only on account of 
 
 G 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 hae oo 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 24 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 his own excellent landscapes, but for his efforts to convey to his native country many fine speci- 
 mens of Italian art. But in the end the proposal came to nothing, and brought only disappoint- 
 t. 
 
 paintings which had been executed in Rome; and then, hearing that an altar-piece was required 
 
 
 
 ment and discouragement to the artis So he set to work quietly to complete and retouch the 
 for the recently erected Catholic Church of St Patrick in Edinburgh, he offered to paint a 
 Descent from the Cross if the mere materials were provided. The offer was accepted; the 
 picture was exhibited, and afterwards mezzotinted, very indifferently, as a subscription work for the 
 Association for the Promotion of Fine Arts in Scotland. The after-fate of this striking altar-piece 
 is curious. During some repairs in the church it was removed from its place and deposited in a 
 lumber-room. At length, its value having been forgotten, it was sold as rubbish; and a few years 
 ago it was discovered in a broker’s shop by a keen-sighted Edinburgh collector, and secured for an 
 insignificant sum. 
 
 Among the other religious subjects which Scott produced may be mentioned The Kiss of Judas, 
 painted in 1836; Zhe Baptism of Christ, 1846; and The Dead rising at the Crucifixion, 1844, a 
 weird and stupendous picture, filled with figures, more than life-sized, seen rising from their tombs 
 
 and cleaving the darkened air. 
 
 Vil. 
 
 The other works which occupied Scott until the end may be divided into two broad classes : 
 those deriving their subject from poetry of the more ideal sort, or suggested directly by the artist’s 
 imagination ; and those which, however wide and abstract may be their remoter significance and 
 suggestion, derive their subject from the actual, from history and human life. We may most con- 
 veniently consider his works under these two classes, and not adhere to any strictly chronological 
 sequence; for, as we said before, Scott’s habit of constant retouching and reworking, renders it 
 difficult to assign to many of them one accurate date. In dealing with pictures so full as these of 
 thought and invention—and which, besides, are for the most part in private hands, and not easily 
 
 accessible to the public—our remarks will fall mainly into the form of specific description: we 
 
 
 
 shall aim less to gauge coldly and critically the presence of this or that technical quality, than to 
 flash—so far as our poor and few words may—some image of the works themselves upon the 
 mental retina of the reader. 
 
 Those of the first class are generally small in size, and rich and glowing in colour. Though, of 
 course, they insist somewhat on detail, they yet show clearly that Scott’s manner and way of handling 
 was formed with a view to work on a great scale; that he was no “little master,” not a painter of 
 cabinet pieces meant to be examined inch by inch by the eye-glass of the connoisseur, but of pictures 
 which owe their effect to the full extent of the canvas, to the nobility of the colour and design 
 seen as a broad and related whole. 
 
 The most important of them is The Triumph of Love, in which, as in all Scott’s pictures dealing 
 with the tender passion, the colour is bright, light, and airy, the whole blushing like a rose-bed. 
 
 Above is the blue and white sky; beyond is the blended blue of the sea, and the city of the work-a- 
 
 
 
 day world withdrawn into the far distance, and shut off by a line of trees from the path along which 
 
 ey Q: 7 ts ig rorshi ers Thevw ew; 
 the potent god conducts his worshippers. They sweep along, an eager company of all ranks and 
 
 
 

 
 HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 
 
 w 
 on 
 
 conditions of humanity,—gay maidens, and armed men; a grey-heard, with his star of honour; a 
 crowned king, bent to the earth; a tonsured monk; a scalloped pilgrim; a youth, who now at length 
 removes the mask which has hitherto concealed his face—his very self. Raised high over all is Love 
 
 himself, with quiver and uplift bow, his blessed feet, his own closest and truest presence, resting on 
 
 
 
 the head of a maiden, who passes on as in a dream, with bowed head and folded hands, unconscious 
 of all but the vision which her heart discloses. 
 A small Cupid sharpening his Arrows is a far more complete work than the artist usually 
 
 gives us, admirable in the drawing and modelling of the figure, and thoroughly harmonious in its 
 
 
 
 background of rose-trellis; but a more important subject is Time surpris 
 
 
 
 ing Love, begun in Rome, 
 
 
 
 
 
 but not finished till about 1843. Here the blue and white of the sky is cast grandly and broadly as 
 by the Venetian masters; in the dark distance is a deserted maiden and a fleeing lover, while in the 
 foreground stands a little terrified Cupid, his arrows all discharged, now at length aware of the 
 
 presence of Time, whose keen scythe-blade circles him, whose great dark-brown figure has been 
 
 
 
 seated behind him all the while, gazing on him grimly from beneath his scanty white locks. 
 Delusive Pleasures and Children following Fortune are two subjects distinguished by colour of 
 exceptional and almost Titianesque richness. In the former we see a central altar, on which stands 
 a chalice heaped with grapes, adorned with leafage, and circled by an iridescent rainbow. Treading 
 with flying feet the filmy surface of this rainbow is a maiden, and behind a blindfolded youth about 
 
 to seize her. The girl is black-haired, with glowing flesh-tints, and crowned with vine-leaves; in her 
 
 
 
 right hand she holds a red rose, with her left she adjusts the drapery of yellow and crimson with 
 which she is lightly clad. Beyond on either side is a female figure, bending forward, gazing down 
 on him who has been her pursuer, whose dream is past, and who is seen falling through the 
 unsubstantial iris pathway into the dark misty gulf beneath. 
 
 In the other picture the face of the female Fortune is admirably conceived, its expression 
 excellent in its individuality and look of fickle falseness. She differs from the Fortune in Mr 
 Burne-Jones’s design —that regardless figure, with bent head and downcast eyes, who turns care- 
 lessly, and as if in a dream, her great wheel which elevates or depresses the mortals that are 
 bound upon its rim. The Fortune of Scott is eager and actively tempting. She holds aloft her 
 prizes—sceptres, coronets, decorations of honour—and breaks away from an exquisite group of excited 
 struggling children that clamour around her, children like the attendants of Titian’s Bacchus, their 
 brown ruddy skins half draped in crimson and white, their dark hair chapleted with green leaves 
 and adorned with peacock-feathers. The robe of Fortune flutters behind her against the dark back- 
 ground of bluish sky, and away to the left is seen, far off, a palace with banners waving from its 
 pinnacles—some mundane House of Fame, where her favoured votaries will live happy and honoured 
 all their mortal lives. 
 
 Several of the best works of this class owe their suggestion to Shakespeare—as, for instance, 
 
 
 
 the Ariel and Caliban, preserved in the Scottish National Gallery, and the Oberon and Puck 
 listening to the Mermaid’s Song, with its poetic setting of moonlight shed over the ocean. In the 
 Ariel and Caliban, we have contrasted the differing natures of the two creatures of earth and air, 
 Everything around the earth-spirit is in keeping with his uncouth and bestial figure—the bundle of 
 
 fagots which he carries, the loathsome body of a dead snake which he holds in his hand, the bare 
 
 
 
 ground on which he crouches—terrified by the strange gambols of Ariel above him—with its growth 
 
 1 Tlustration, No. 15. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 26 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 of discoloured herbage livid mushrooms and deformed cactus, and the bloated toad that perches 
 
 beside him and gazes into his face as though claiming kinship. Around Ariel, too, everything is 
 
 
 
 in keeping with the graceful lightness of his spir -form—a fragile white butterfly flits beside him, 
 and his slender shape is seen against a delicate softly tinted sky, barred with rosy clouds, and passing 
 through green away to yellow at the zenith. 
 
 The Puck fleeing before the Dawn, which has been engraved in line by John Le Conte, is another 
 exquisite subject. Puck is seen aloft to the right, floating on his moth’s wings into the star-quickened 
 darkness, his body drawn together, the feet crossed, the knees raised to the chin and circled by 
 the clasped hands. He glances down, with roguish eyes that emit strange brilliancy, on the earth 
 with its terraced gardens, its dark contorted fir-boughs, its tall poplar spires, and its expanse of 
 level sea. To the left, in the brightening space of sky, are seen delicate fairy forms sporting in a 
 fantastic ring; and in the star-quickened darkness to the right, the sharp crescent moon dips bencath 
 
 the water. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 It is in the second class, that of works dealing with real life and deriving their subjects from history, 
 that we find the largest, and, in many ways, the most impressive of Scott’s pictures. In 1841 was 
 exhibited Queen Elizabeth at the Globe Theatre, the production of which extended over two years. It 
 contains much excellent character-painting, is well composed, with the interest admirably concentrated 
 in spite of the multiplicity of component parts, but it is unfortunate that the figure of Shakespeare is 
 
 one of the least satisfactory—limp and ineffective; and the colour, though still rich and fine, seems to 
 
 
 
 have changed and darkened with time and over-varnishing, so that we can scarcely feel that we see 
 the canvas as it left the artist’s hand. 
 
 The Death of Jane Shore was exhibited in the same year. Its handling is definite even to hardness, 
 its subject is repulsive; yet, like all the artist’s works, it shows his unerring power of going straight to 
 the very heart of his subject. In the pale figure of her who had been caressed by royalty, lying there 
 dead and half-naked; in the horror of the bystanders, and the pitying helpful gesture of a maiden 
 who, bending forward, is restrained by the youth beside her—brother or lover, we see the sad moral 
 of it all—the change from beauty to ashes, from loveliness to corruption. 
 
 To the same period is referable The Duke of Gloster entering the Water-gate of Calais—The 
 Traitor 
 
 
 
 Gate, as the picture is now titled—the most complete, harmonious, and impressive of the 
 artist’s historical subjects; probably, setting quality against quality, the greatest of all his works. A 
 boat is entering the dark vaulted portals of a prison, whose heavy door is swung open by the hands of 
 
 unseen warders. One of the rowers crouches down in his seat, overcome by the ominous gloom of the 
 
 
 
 place. At the stern is the doomed nobleman, his face pale but composed,—apprehensive, evidently, of 
 danger, but one able resolutely to suppress all signs of fear. Higher in the stern are armed guards, 
 their black forms towering above him, and seeming to overshadow his figure. Beyond is a distance with 
 a stretch of sea, on which a far-off ship is riding freely ; in the sky above, the chill light of early morning 
 is slowly mastering that of the waning moon. ‘The sense of all that space and freedom of the outer world 
 is grandly contrasted with the gloomy vault which the boat is entering, grey and ghost-like when 
 
 1 Illustration, No. 16. 2 Tilustration, No. 17. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 27 
 
 compared with the warm reality of the torch-lighted figures in front who wait ready to receive it; and 
 there is a fine imaginative touch in the introduction of the star above, its rays struggling through a 
 barred portcullis. The picture is wonderfully free from the usual defects of the painter’s technique ; it 
 is no less powerful in form, colour, and handling, than in invention. The admirable quality of the 
 distance is especially striking—Corot-like in its quiet and tender grey mystery. 
 
 Richard ITI. and the Princes was painted in 1842. It is a powerful and intense tragedy: the 
 deformed usurper bending forward and holding the children, one with either hand, as though he would 
 never let them go, scanning the face of the elder—the heir—with eager evil gaze; the grim 
 attendants, one holding behind him a dungeon key, two, armed and mail-clad, standing silent and 
 ominous like fates beside the regal seat. In the beautiful face, and shrinking yet stately figure of the 
 queen, we have what is probably Scott’s finest personification of female comeliness and grace. 
 
 While these pictures were in progress, he was also occupied with a still more important work. 
 
 Shortly after his father’s death in 1841, he built a new and extensive studio at Easter Dalry, a suburb 
 
 
 
 of Edinburgh, that he might have facilities for the execution of those works of ample size, in which 
 
 
 
 he felt that his art had its fullest scope. Here he began, on a canvas nearly 20 feet in length, the 
 Vasco de Gama encountering the Spirit of the Storm, which he always regarded as the main pro- 
 
 duction of his later period, as the Discord had been of his earlier. It shows the great foreshortened 
 
 
 
 shape of the ship's deck, with its crowded figures, terrified by the weird apparition of the Spirit of 
 the Storm, who is seen in the darkened and bewildered sky, as by a momentary flash of lightning. 
 The grouping and the varied gestures of the mariners beneath are grandly conceived,—some striving 
 to be calm, some driven almost demented, a monk, lax and helpless with terror, his beard grasped 
 by the Moor beside him, who points to the horror which his spells are powerless to exorcise. Amid 
 all this tumult of confused emotions is the supreme figure of De Gama, standing firm, his feet 
 planted on the deck, his weapon—sword and cross in one—pressed to his heart. Depicting, pri- 
 marily, a scene from history or tradition, the scope and meaning of the picture becomes, through 
 the earnestness and intensity of its treatment, wider and more universal. “It is a heroic man 
 filling his sphere, sufficient for his circumstances, a match for fate. It is a universal text. It 
 stands for Homer, St Paul, Dante, Michael Angelo, Luther, Shakespeare, Cromwell, Kepler, Luis de 
 Caméens, or for Scott himself, as truly as for De Gama. Nor is any man alive who may not or 
 ought not to see the express image of himself in this self-sufficing Vasco, with his faith in the cross, 
 his confidence in himself, and his ready-handed use of means.”? The picture has splendid qualities of 
 
 colour and design; and though not without the occasional faults of draughtsmanship which seem 
 
 
 
 quite inseparable from the artist’s works, it conclusively proved his ability to treat figures of a colossal 
 size with a skill and vigour which have no parallel in the productions of the Scottish school. 
 
 The Alchymist, 1838, and Peter the Hermit preaching the Crusades, 1845, may be regarded as 
 companion historical subjects, illustrating two different phases of the medieval spirit. Both pictures, 
 while full of variety and character in their numerous subsidiary parts, are mainly remarkable for the 
 strongly imaginative and individual personification of their principal figure. 
 
 In The Alchymist we see the man of quasi science—in part a self-deceiver, in greater part a 
 conscious deceiver of others—his form clad in academic black, and poised on tilted stool. In his 
 right hand he holds a mortar, whence a curl of smoke issues as he stirs the contents with a pestle. 
 His head is raised in eager attitude; like the Ancient Mariner, he holds his audience with his 
 
 1 Tllustration, No. 18. 2 Dr Samuel Brown. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 28 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 glittering eye. Beside him are gathered the implements of occult research — glass phials, retorts, 
 diagrams, &e. ; behind him in a shadowed corner is a skeleton half swathed in drapery, and lying on 
 it are surgeons’ knives, with their suggestions of what was then held to be the unhallowed efforts of 
 irreverent science to wring from the lifeless clay secrets which might aid the living. At the lecturer's 
 feet sits a scribbling clerk, and leaning against the door of the laboratory is a servant, a shock-haired 
 plebeian figure, drowsed and weary with his labours at the furnace-mouth. Before and around is 
 grouped a motley auditory. In front we see the broad back of a Scottish soldier of fortune. ‘Two 
 figures to the right, conspicuous by their gay dresses of pale blue and yellow, are young exquisites 
 of the period. One has brought his lute into the lecture-hall, and leans back in easy posture, his hand 
 held lightly behind his head as he laughs gently at the drollery of the lecturer’s experiment. The 
 other is more intent,—the alchymist’s fervour has been strong enough to dissipate his frivolity for 
 a moment. In the earnest face seen in profile beside them, the painter has depicted his own 
 thoughtful features. To the left are two specimens of the burgher class, grave members of the 
 municipal council, eminently stolid, much puzzled. In sharp contrast to their Teutonic dulness is 
 a green-robed Hastern seated near, his hand resting on his mouth and sustaining his head, and in 
 his dark Semitic face the unsatisfied yearning look of a man eager for supersensuous knowledge—a 
 Magian this, ready to leave his home and seek the radiance of any star that may rise to brighten 
 the firmament of East or West. On the seats that slope upward is a varied gathering of courtier, 
 clown, and priest; while in the centre of them all sits the crowned figure of the reigning prince, 
 with gentle face and “old smiling eyes,” like the mild ideal king of Pippa’s song. 
 
 In Peter the Hermit the main figure is seen on the raised steps of a church porch, his form 
 attenuated by fast and vigil, and by the fervour of the unresting spirit within. He is a man of the 
 Baptist’s type, a desert-dweller, entering the city for a moment, visiting the haunts of men only to 
 stir their inhabitants, and work them to the fulfilment of the visions which have come to him in solitude. 
 Kneeling on one knee, with raised hand and impassioned gesture he sways the crowd beneath, who 
 become under his eloquence like some mighty organ that sends forth billows of tumultuous sound at 
 the touch of a master’s finger. In front, to the centre, is a mailed knight kissing the cross of his sword- 
 hilt and swearing the Crusader’s oath,—his figure rightly prominent, as indicating the military nature 
 of the mission which the Hermit preaches. Around we see all differences of feeling and attitude. Here 
 a girl fastens the red badge upon her lover's shoulder; there a mother strives to stir into fervour her 
 student son; or a daughter, clinging round her father’s neck, would keep him from the Holy War; 
 while on one side is seen a young apothecary, his keen sneering face expressing the contempt of the 
 scientist for the enthusiasm with which a fervid spirit can inspire the vulgar herd. Behind the swaying 
 multitude is a space of chill sky wanly lighted by the crescent moon, and a great gloomy mass of 
 towered and belfried masonry, a fitting type of the medieval church which had grown so hard and 
 intolerant, and had in it so little of the gentleness and sweet reasonableness of Christ. 
 
 Wallace the Defender of Scotland, is another of the artist's historical subjects or personifications, 
 one which had an especial attraction for Scott, and which he frequently treated. A version of it was 
 painted so early as 1829, another was left incomplete on the artist’s easel at the time of his death. In 
 1848 he produced a triptych of the subject, with exquisite use of his rich, powerful, and glowing colour. 
 The central and most important compartment is memorial of the English defeat at Stirling Bridge. 
 It shows the prostrate form of Cressingham, and Wallace towering above him with lifted battle-axe 
 
 and the yellow folds and red rampant lion of the Scottish standard flapping around him. To the 
 
 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 29 
 
 right is Edward, with drawn sword and indignant brow, ready for the attack. The two wings are 
 representative of English and Scottish warfare, the one filled with archers for whose success a monk 
 
 kneels in prayer, the other, with spearmen who are cheered on to victory by the wild music of a 
 harper. 
 
 IX. 
 
 We may here speak of the designs and drawings executed by Scott. The most ambitious of 
 them were those which he contributed to the national competition that was held preparatory to 
 the decoration of Westminster Hall. This occasion was felt by all the more earnest artists of the 
 country to be one of the last importance, and by none more than by Scott. In 1841 he published 
 a pamphlet on the subject, entitled ‘British, French, and German Painting; being a reference to the 
 grounds which render the proposed Painting of the New Houses of Parliament important as a Public 
 Measure.’ The occasion, he says, “ becomes a demand upon the mental status of the country. It will 
 in very important respects be a verdict of life or death upon the future efforts of artists in Great 
 Britain.” He is careful to insist that the proposed frescoes must be no mere pleasant patterns on the 
 walls, no mere meaningless arabesques. In this sense “Raphael in the Vatican could never, in 
 English language, be styled decorative, still less Michael Angelo in the Sistine.” Neither must the 
 designs revert, as did the works of Cornelius and Overbeck, “to subjects and treatment which have 
 lapsed from their worth by the passage of nearly four centuries,”—they must be art that is fresh, 
 living, and of to-day, finding and pursuing such conceptions as are “abstract and dictated by the 
 general intelligence.” 
 
 In 1842 Scott contributed two designs to the competition, Drake witnessing the Destruction 
 of the Spanish Ships, and Wallace defending Scotland,—at the same time informing his friends 
 of his determination, should he be successful, of taking no part in the subsequent work in London, 
 unless he obtained full control of an entire department, and was permitted to carry out his own 
 thoughts in his own way. But the cartoons were by no means adapted to the public taste. Like 
 all Scott’s works, they verged on wilfulness in their individuality, and showed no strenuous effort 
 after executive skill and exactitude. As was to be expected, they failed of success; and a like fate 
 befell the other designs which he afterwards sent to a similar competition. The first prize was 
 carried off by Armitage, then a young man little known in this country, fresh from the academic 
 training of France, and participation in the painting of The Hemicycle in the Palais des Beaux 
 Arts under the eye of his master Delaroche. 
 
 The separate smaller drawings of Scott are very numerous, their method, slight and rapid as 
 compared with that of oil-pictures, fitting them to the readiest means for the expression of his 
 teeming imagination. Indeed, as Mr Ruskin has remarked, there seems to be an especial appropri- 
 ateness in monochrome as the vehicle of art which is mainly that of imagination and thought rather 
 than of mere sensation; and it is doubtful whether such subjects as the Melencolia and the Knight 
 
 and Death would have retained their full impressiveness had they been carried out in finished 
 
 
 
 colour. Scott was fond of sketching with the brush and a rather liquid tint, which readily responded 
 to his rapid hand, the line being sensitive and of easily varied thickness and depth. One drawing 
 
 of this method, The Sirens, lately in the possession of Dr David Laing, we remember as singularly 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 30 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 passionate in the strenuousness of the mariner who binds Ulysses remorselessly to the mast, and 
 in the steady action of the rowers, who never dare to raise their eyes as the boat flashes past the 
 enchanted shore and the eager enticing forms that people it. 
 
 Still more impressive is the design entitled Self-Accusation, or Man and his Conscience.! The 
 scene is a lonely shore, with a background of dreary undulating waves beneath a chill grey sky. 
 Along the beach are speeding two naked figures; in front a terror -stricken man, his form ruddy 
 with the hue of mortal life, his hands cast forward despairingly, and his face turned back, gazing 
 in horror at the weird pale spirit-presence that follows him—a double of himself in shape and 
 attitude, setting his foot in the print which the mortal’s foot has hardly left, gazing into his coun- 
 tenance with an accusing stare, from which there is no escape, and stopping his ears with his 
 fingers, deaf to all remonstrance. The design has been described by the late Oliver Madox-Brown in 
 his ‘Hebditch’s Legacy, and it forms the subject of a striking little poem in the ‘Poet's Harvest 
 Home’ of Mr W. B. Scott. 
 
 Many sets of drawings, like those entitled The Anchorite, Unhappy Love, and Scenes from the 
 Life and Thoughts of a Student Painter, were executed ; more were only projected, and the subjects 
 of their individual illustrations indicated in writing: two very important series of designs, the 
 illustrations to the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and to Nichol’s ‘ Architecture of the Heavens,’ were com- 
 pleted and published as engravings after Scott's death. The former date from 1841, the year of 
 Scott's greatest and most impressive picture, The Traitor’s Gate. The original drawings, forty in 
 number, are in pencil, executed with much vigour, in slightly shaded outline. In some of 
 them we find more of that beauty which comes of quietude than in the former illustrations to the 
 ‘Ancient Mariner, in the bowed heads of The Angels that ery continually Holy! Holy! Holy !? for 
 
 example, in the Christian harnessed for the Pilgrimage, the Christian welcomed in the Palace 
 
 
 
 Beautiful, and the Christian instructed in the Palace Beautiful—a design which was also carried 
 out very successfully as an oil-picture. But whatever charm there is in these placid scenes, the 
 artist is, with two exceptions, most powerful and most individual in subjects which have their 
 motive in violent and vigorous action, in the tremendous force of demoniac assault in The Fight 
 with Apollyon, in the terror of the descent of ‘Ignorance’ in fiendish clutches through The Byway 
 to Hell. Two of the designs, conceived in calmer mood, Christian entering the Valley of the 
 Shadow of Death, and The Martyrdom of Faithful, may rank as among the most impressive 
 and suggestive subjects of modern art. In the first we see Christian, “ever a fighter,” entering, 
 sword in hand and covered with his shield, on his “one fight more, the best and the last.” Towering 
 above his pigmy human form is a gigantic Presence, sharply foreshortened so that the face is almost 
 wholly concealed. The eyes are hidden, the expression of the countenance can only be guessed at. 
 This great figure, vast like some mountain, some elemental feature of nature, casts over the human 
 form beneath a shadow which in the distance, towards which the man advances, darkens like the 
 recess of some gloomy cavern, and in front is outlined sharply by the serrated edge of that “like- 
 ness of a kingly crown” which the Presence wears. It is Death, whose regal diadem, whose tyrant 
 sway over the mind and imagination of man, lies in his mystery, his impenetrable shadow. 
 
 In The Martyrdom of Faithful this shadow is rolled away, and, as in the death of Stephen, 
 we see the heavens opened. Beneath is the witness for the truth, amid the crackling fagots and 
 the fierce flames, watched by the stern faces of soldier and executioner. But the moment of release 
 1 Tllustration, No. 19. 
 
 2 Tllustration, No. 20. % [llustration, No. 21. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 31 
 
 1as come: in the closed eyes, the lax open mouth, and the head that has fallen back and is pressed 
 against the stake, we see that the man has sighed forth in anguish his last gasp of mortal breath, 
 and has gained the insentient calm of death. And above are heavenly ministrants with palm 
 ranches and a celestial chariot, and floating towards them is a form of utter peace, the hands laid 
 softly together, the hair flowing quietly from the upturned face, which is calm with a new immortal 
 
 ife that knows neither pain nor sorrow. Italian art herself has no vision more poctie or impressive 
 
 
 
 ‘han this. 
 
 The other designs of which we have to speak are the series of inventions illustrating an edition 
 of Professor J. P. Nichol’s ‘ Architecture of the Heavens,’ published in 1850. The imaginative mind 
 of Scott had always been strongly drawn in wonder and reverence to the splendour and vastness 
 of the conceptions presented by astronomy; he tells us that even as a child the passages on the 
 
 science in his school-books “were read with an unction and a glow which made old Master Cooper 
 
 
 
 select them for specimens of my elocution.” Professor Nichol, a man of more than common enthu- 
 
 
 
 siasm and poetic feeling, gladly welcomed the co-operation of such an artist, and the result is a set 
 of designs strangely differing from the formal diagrams with which such treatises are usually illus- 
 trated, and giving, as art can, “the impassioned expression on the face of science.” The series was 
 to have been etched by Scott's own hand; but his death prevented this, and only a selection of the 
 
 ibed by Mr W. B. Scott and Mr R. C. Bell. 
 
 drawings which he executed were tran: 
 
 
 
 The volume itself is now scarce, but one subject is given in the memoir—Zhe Procession of 
 
 Unknown Powers'—grave spirit-forms, each bearing a light, floating out of the distance of the 
 
 future, passing the human spirit who appears seated on the round of the earth, and then vanishing 
 
 
 
 for ever in the past. They may stand for the Days of mortal life, each with his proffered gift— 
 
 “Out of Eternity 
 This new Day is born; 
 Into Eternity, 
 
 At night, will return.” 
 
 In a second design we have The Astronomer set in his observatory, 1: 
 
 
 
 ised high over the din and 
 bustle of the dim spot that men call earth, the city beneath hidden by his elevation, only the tops 
 
 of its highest spires visible, and around and behind him the quietne: 
 
 
 
 of moonlit sky and sea. The 
 man is old and feeble; the staff with which he stays his tottering steps rests beside him: his face 
 has no special charm of beauty or grace, but it may be compared for the look of reverence and 
 awe which it lifts towards the immensities above, to Baldini’s Astrologia, with her pale cheeks, and 
 
 quivering lips, and rapt eager gaze into the starry spaces. In a second rendering of The Astron- 
 
 
 
 
 
 omer, we have a boldly conceived, symbolic figure, grasping in his outstretched arms a sphere 
 with its revolving planets. It might serve as an illustration of Herbert’s “fleet astronomer,” who 
 has “walked with a staff to heaven,” whose “eyes dismount the highest star,” who 
 “Can bore 
 And thread the spheres with his quick-piercing mind. 
 Who views their stations, walks from door to door, 
 
 Surveys as though he had designed 
 
 To make a purchase there.” 
 
 The All-Sustaining Hand * shows us Man kneeling with bowed head on a promontory of earth, 
 1 Tilustration, No. 22. ® Illustration, No. 23. % Tllustration, No. 24. 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 32 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 the corn waving beside him, and above him the outspread palm which upholds all mortal life, which 
 ights the lamps of the sky, and sustains the winged things of the air, In The Creation of a 
 Star? we have a literal rendering of the saying of the Psalmist—* By the word of the Lord were 
 the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.” Above is the venerable 
 fisure of the Almighty, leaning from circles of radiance, with extended hands of benediction, breath- 
 
 mbolie of 
 
 
 
 ing divine potency into the void; while beneath are a cluster of nimble eager spirits, 
 His manifold creative virtues, gathered round the new-lit luminary. Zhe Comet* seems to shadow 
 orth a theory —one rather of the mystic than of the astronomer — that comets are embryo worlds 
 
 in the process of formation. A strange human figure is speeding through the darkness, casting 
 
 
 
 
 
 vehind it a broad trail of light, the body crouched together like a child in the womb, the feet 
 
 
 
 drawn upwards to the hips, the head shrouded in antenatal coverings. In another drawing we have 
 a splendidly imaginative subject—The Footprint of the Omnipotent. We see a great foot set on a 
 seething liquid mass, which flies off at the touch into grand mysterious human forms, their faces 
 averted and unseen, their heads crowned with coronals of stars. In another illustration, The 
 Nebule it is titled, vague involved forms appear locked in strange strife—the strife from nothing- 
 ness into being: in yet another, that naked long-haired figure of indeterminate sex under which Scott 
 has so often figured the human soul, is poised in mid-air, the head thrown back, the hands crossed 
 over the forehead, listening with intolerable rapture to The Eternal Melodies of the Spheres,’ and 
 behind, arranged in symmetrical arcs, are companies of angelic forms, with locked arms and inter- 
 
 lacing hair, who “sing, and singing in their glory move.” And then in the final design, for end 
 
 
 
 of all, the artist has drawn three dead or dying men, and has gathered around them the implements 
 of intellectual labour—lyre, compass, rule, and scroll. One figure lies prostrate on the earth, his 
 
 face hidden, his hand yet holding a book; another sits fainting in utter weakness; the third sage, 
 
 
 
 
 
 whose foot rests significantly on an hour-glass, is breathing his last, attended to the end by human 
 
 
 
 sympathy, seen as a female form who sustains the dying man. Beside her hovers a winged angel, 
 who directs her gaze aloft to where, in a broad band of light which streams from heaven, the parted 
 soul, like a little child, “perfect of lineament, perfect of feature,” ascends with head held back in 
 joyful wonder and arms widely and eagerly outspread as it enters upon “an hospitable eternity.” 
 We have said that Scott was engaged upon this great series of designs at the time of his death ; 
 
 and this, its last subject, may surely be received as the final message of his art. 
 
 X. 
 
 Very shortly before his death it was decided to purchase his Vasco de Gama by public sub- 
 scription and deposit it in the Trinity House of Leith. Several members of the Scottish Academy 
 waited upon the artist to inform him of this resolution; and one of the survivors tells us of the 
 touching character of the interview, and says that even now, after the lapse of more than thirty 
 
 years, the weird emphasis of Scott’s “Too late, too late!”—the words with which he received the 
 
 
 
 g in his ears. 
 
 The end came on the 5th of March 1849. Alway: 
 
 announcement—sceems still to be soundin 
 
 
 
 , at least since his residence in Italy, Scott’s 
 
 1 Illustration, No. 25. 2 Tllustration, No. 26. 8 Tllustration, No. 27. + Tilustration, No. 28. 
 
 
 

 
 HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 33 
 
 health had been feeble, and his forty-three years of life, so filled with eager work and ardent 
 thought, had worn thin the ties that bind soul and body together. His mother and his brother 
 were with him to the end. As he lay a-dying, his thoughts were still busy with the art in which 
 he had lived and had his being. “If I could but have time yet, I think I could meet the public 
 in their own way more, and yet do what I think good,” he would murmur; and when his brother 
 
 strove to encourage him with the hope of recovery—<If it were but so! . . . No, it cannot be—it 
 
 
 
 seems too great a prize, too awfully grand a thing to enjoy life again with this experience overcome, 
 
 
 
 
 
 to have been thus ill, to have seen into the darkness and return to the clearness of life. It takes 
 
 a long time to know how to live and work,” 
 
 
 
 There are many portraits by which we who did not know Scott as he lived, may gather what 
 was the appearance of the man. There is a likeness by his own hand, engraved in the Memoir, and 
 hat painted by Charles Lees, R.S.A., both of them manifestly faithful and unaffected, agreeing both 
 in the clear-cut, delicate lining of the features, in the firm compression of the beautiful mouth, in 
 heir look of intellect, refinement, and resolution. Sir John Steell has carved in marble? the head 
 of his brother-artist and life-long friend, and presented it to the Scottish Academy—a bust apparently 
 somewhat idealised in the inspired beauty of its lifted face, but on the testimony of all who are 
 
 vest able to judge, true to their impression and memory of the man, It shows the artist as he 
 
 
 
 
 
 might be at the beginning of his career, young yet, and full of hope in the untried possibilities of 
 
 ife. There is a pathetic little pencil-drawing by his brother, sketched as he lay asleep not many 
 
 
 
 nours before the end. But the portrait which to those of us who know Scott only through reverent 
 study of his works seems perhaps the most complete and realisable embodiment of their painter, is 
 one of the striking calotypes by D. O. Hill, R.S.A.,? taken, like the last-named likeness, when the artist 
 was worn with labour and sickness. The figure is seen nearly in full length, the head relieved against 
 a curtain, the long dark hair disclosing the square lines of the high forehead: the cheeks are thin 
 and hollow, and the eyes look out from their caverns beneath the brows with a strange expression 
 of sad intensity. Here we have a touch of that weirdness which is so characteristic of Scott’s art,— 
 we see the painter of Zhe Traitor’s Gate, of The Dead Rising.” 
 
 Shortly after the artist’s death a collection of more than fifty of his most notable productions was 
 brought together for exhibition in Edinburgh, and created an impression not easily forgotten among 
 the more thoughtful portion of the art public. 
 
 And surely the time has come when, if Scott’s works were only more widely known, they would 
 command recognition and win praise. For in these days we grow more and more tolerant of art 
 
 6c 
 
 
 
 that has great qualities, especially great imaginative qualities, even when these come to us as “a 
 fair divided excellence,” not “unmixed with baser matter.” Our greatest critic, he who has insisted 
 most strongly upon minute accuracy of workmanship and unswerving truth to nature, has pro- 
 
 nounced not less clearly and emphatically that “art does not consist in any high manual skill 
 
 fo} ’ 
 
 or 
 successful imitation of natural objects, or any scientific and legalised method of performance ;” 
 
 that “all good art agrees in this, that it is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is 
 
 
 
 precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it;” and he has dwelt with charac- 
 teristic eloquence upon the widened horizon, the mighty consequences which follow upon our 
 acceptance of this truth. Blake’s name is one to conjure with. The quaintnesses of the early 
 Italians do not blind us to their sweet imagination; we are no longer deaf to the words of in- 
 
 1 Tllustration, No. 1. ® The head reproduced in Illustration, No. 29. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 34 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 spiration when they are delivered to us “as by the stammering lips of childhood.” Even in our 
 study of the painters of last-century France, we have learned to disengage their especial “virtue” 
 from much in them that is of little worth; to prize them for their clear perception, their keen 
 portrayal of the vivid, transient, common moments of life—for their bestowal on these of the 
 dignity and distinction of art. And if we think of the greatest and most typical of these French- 
 
 men—of Watteau himself,—and remember the dainty precision and vivacity of his method—how 
 
 
 
 he catches the delicate shimmer of silks in the glinting sunshine, and every lightest motion of the 
 
 figures beneath, with all their subtle gestures of half-real love or half-feigned caprice,—we have the 
 sharpest contrast that art can give us to the manner and the chosen subjects of Scott. His figures 
 are strenuous and impetuous in action, vast and massive in repose. With him the colour is rich, 
 glowing, and intense, the design and draughtsmanship large and powerful in spite of many errors of 
 detail. By these high technical qualities his art claims descent from and kinship with that of the 
 
 artists of the great time in Italy; by them he vindicates his choice of his method of expression, 
 
 
 
 proves himself worthy of the name of painter. And besides these technical qualities, he has the 
 clear individuality so precious in art: he is undoubtedly one of that “certain number of artists 
 who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a quality of pleasure not 
 otherwise obtainable.” And in this faculty—one to be felt rather than defined or formulated — 
 eall it imagination, call it “visionary conception,” lies the greatness of the painter whom we have 
 been considering, “I have always judged painting by its sentiment, by its mental bearing, and 
 
 ” 
 
 thought most of new spheres of meaning.” With these words of Scott’s we may end, as we began 
 
 with those of Blake’s. 
 
 
 
 
 
CATALOGUE OF THE WORKS 
 
 OF 
 
 DAN LD SC ONE Res oAe 
 
 S was to be expected in cataloguing the pictures of an artist who died more than thirty years ago, 
 
 we have been unable to discover the present owners of a considerable proportion of the works. 
 These, however, are for the most part paintings of quite minor importance and size. Few of the can- 
 vases are dated; and we are indebted for our chronology mainly to the ‘Memoir’ by Mr W. B. Scott, 
 to the catalogues of the Royal Scottish Academy, and to the catalogue of the artist’s works which were 
 exhibited, in 1849, at 29 Castle Street, Edinburgh. It is to be borne in mind that the paintings of 
 David Scott were frequently worked upon at widely differing intervals, and repainted years after 
 their first completion. Where practicable, we have given the dimensions of the pictures, as an aid to 
 
 future identification, and as indicating, in some roughly approximate way, their relative importance. 
 
 L.—OIL-PICTURES OF ASCERTAINED DATES. 
 WITH NOTES ON THEIR WATER-COLOUR STUDIES AND THEIR ENGRAVINGS. 
 
 1828. Tue Hopes or GENIUS DISPELLED BY Dratu. (44 in. x 36 in.) 
 Scott’s first exhibited picture, The property of Dr A. Woodcock, Anstruther. 
 Royal Institution Exhibition, 1828. 
 
 ms SILENUS AND HIs Company. (14) in. x 14} in.) 
 Afterwards repainted. The property of Mr J. M. Gow, Edinburgh. 
 
 as Tue Last or OSsIAN. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1829. 
 
 1829. Lor AND His DAUGHTERS FLEEING FROM THE CIriEs oF THE Puan. (A picture with life-sized figures.) 
 Repainted in 1831, Engraved by David Scott, for an illustrated Bible, published by Blackie & Sons, 
 Glasgow. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1830. 
 
 Srupy ror Heap or Lor’s Daveurer. (18 in. x 16 in.) 
 The property of Mr George Cousin, Edinburgh. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1830. 
 
 1831. 
 
 
 
 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 Apam AND Eve SINGING THEIR Morninc Hymn. (27 in. x 85 in.) 
 Retouched in 1836. Engraved in Mr W. B. Scott’s ‘Memoir, 1850, and in the present volume. The property 
 of Dr J. Le Gay Brereton, Sydney. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1830. 
 
 THE PILFERED AMPHORA—AN IDYL. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1830. 
 
 
 
 ALLEGORICAL SKETCH OF WALLACE DEFENDING ScoTLaNp. (Small picture.) 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1831. 
 
 
 
 Tue Deare or Sappno. (Upright, 15.in. x 23 in.) 
 The property of Mrs Constable, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1830. 
 
 PorTRAIT OF SiR JOHN 8! 
 
 
 
 BELL, RSA. (Life-sized bust-portrait.) 
 
 VENUS. 
 Royal Institution Exhibition, 1829. 
 
 THE CLoup. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1831. 
 
 FINGAL AND THE Sprrir or Lopr. (Upright, 37 in. x 45} in.) 
 
 The property of Dr A. Woodcock, Anstruther. An etching from this picture, in which the figures were sketched 
 in by the artist, and the background added by another engraver, probably Charles Brand, was begun but 
 never completed. 
 
 Royal Institution Exhibition, 1829. 
 
 CupID. 
 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1831. 
 SCANDINAVIAN WARRIOR IN PEACE. 
 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1831. 
 
 Nimrop, tue micury Hunter. (Upright, 544 in. x 69 in.) 
 n, Edinburgh. Reproduced in the present volume. 
 
 
 
 The property of Mr W. Dic’ 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1832. 
 
 Tur DEAD SARPEDON BORNE BY SLEEP AND Deatu. (Upright, 54 in. x 70 in.) 
 The property of Mrs S. Brown, Edinburgh. This subject was also treated in a small water-colour, in the 
 possession of Mr W. B. Scott. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1832. 
 
 Carn. (Upright, 62 in. x 7 
 The property of the Royal Scottish Academy. 
 
 2 in.) 
 
 
 
 REMORSE. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1832. 
 
 RUSSIANS BURYING THE DEAD, (36 in. x 19 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1832. 
 
 Younc APOLLO GAINS THE Pree oF REEDS FROM Pan. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 A mezzotint plate from this picture was begun by Mr John Le Conte, but never completed. 
 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1832; and Royul Academy Exhibition, 1845. 
 PortTRAIT OF CHARLES Branp, Engraver. (About 16 in. x 20 in.) 
 
 N OF OLD BY HyPERION. 
 2 
 
 AURORA RISING FROM THE SEA, AS 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 18 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 PorTRAIT OF THE ARTIST. (234in. x 30 in.) 
 The property of Mr James Leathart, Newcastle. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott, in his ‘Memoir,’ 1850. 
 
 
 
CATALOGUE. 
 
 oo 
 NI 
 
 1832, PorTRAIT oF THE ARTIST'S FarHEr. (36 in, x 28 in.) 
 In the possession of Mr W. B. Scott. An unpublished mezzotint engraving by Mr John Le Conte is given in 
 the present volume. 
 
 i Portrait or THE ARtist’s Moruer. (36 in. x 28 in.) 
 
 Tn the possession of Mr W. B. Scott. 
 
 
 
 5 Portrait or Mr W. B. Scorr. (30 in. x 25 in.) 
 
 Tn his possession, and etched by him in his ‘ Poems,’ 1875. 
 
 
 
 Copy oF Two Hxaps FRoM VERON “CHRIST IN THE House oF Lxvi,’ at VENICE. (23 m, x 18 in.) 
 The property of Mr Thomas Bonnar, Edinburgh. 
 
 1833. TIME SURPRISING Love, (39 in. x 29 in.) 
 
 Retouched in 1848. The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1848. 
 
 
 
 
 
 - Cory or MicuarL AnGgLo’s “DxLpuic Srpyi.” (About 48 in. x 36 in.) 
 The property of Mr J. T. Gibson Craig, Edinburgh. 
 
 # Copy or “Tue Fartus,” py Tintorer, (124 in. x 12} in.) 
 The property of Mr Thomas Bonnar, Edinburgh. 
 
 ie Tue Four Times or THE Day—Mornine, Noon, Twiticur, anp Nicur. (Uprights, each 22 in. x 29 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. The artist executed small water-colour copies of these, of which the 
 Morning and Twilight are the property of Mr T. Bonnar, Edinburgh. Ther 
 
 re also small oil versions of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 these two subjects (oval, 11 x 13) in the po on of Mr J. T. Gibson Craig, Edinburgh,—the Moming 
 
 
 
 differing considerably in treatment from the water-colour and the larger work in oil. 
 
 - SapPHO AND ANACREON. (Upright, 55 in. x 69 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1835. Royal Scottish Academy Loan Exhibition, 1880. 
 
 Tue Vintacer. (Upright, 34 in. x 45 in.) 
 In the National Gallery, Edinburgh, the property of the Board of Manufactures for Scotland. Reproduced in 
 the present volume. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhilition, 1835. 
 
 Discorp: or THE HousEHoLD Gops Drstroyep, (About 156 in. x 126 in.) 
 Repainted 1839. The property of Mr James Leathart, Newcastle. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘ Memoir,’ 
 and in the present volume. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1840. 
 
 Tue Spirits OF THE Lyre. (Upright, 18} in. x 22 in.) 
 The property of Mr James Leathart, Newcastle. 
 
 Mercury TRYING THE Lyre. (Upright, 23 in. x 30 in.) 
 The property of the Rev. Dr A. L. Simpson, Derby. 
 
 
 
 1834, Operon AND PucK LISTENING TO THE Mermam’s Sone. (Upright, 26} in, x 354 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘Selections from the Works of 
 D. Scott.’ 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1836. 
 
 Nicozo MAacHIAvELLE AND A Beaaar. (24 in. x 294 in.) 
 The head of Machiavelli from a bust in the ducal palace, Florence. The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1836. Royal Scottish Academy Loan Exhibition, 1880. 
 
 
 
 1835, Tue TAKING DOWN FROM THE Cross. (106 in. x 123 in.) 
 The property of Mr J. M. Gow, Edinburgh. Engraved in mezzotint by R. M. Hodgetts in 1836, for the members 
 
 of the Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland. Scott executed these small copies in oil, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 38 
 
 1836. 
 
 1837. 
 
 1838. 
 
 1839. 
 
 1840. 
 
 
 
 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 using the engraving as the basis. One of these is in the possession of Mr T. Carfrae, Edinburgh. Another 
 passed into the hands of Lord Meadowbank. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1836. 
 
 Tue Apsot OF MISRULE. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1837. 
 
 JUDAS BETRAYING Curist. (45$in, x 37 in.) 
 The property of Mrs Fairbairn, Greenlaw. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1837. 
 
 ORESTES SEIZED BY THE FURIES AFTER THE MurDER oF HIS Morner CLyTeMNesTRA, (109 in. x 73 in.) 
 The property of Mr W. B. Scott. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1838. 
 
 RACHEL WEEPING FOR HER CHILDREN. (45 in. x 37 in.) 
 The property of Mr Robert Herdman, R.S.A., Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1838. Royal Scottish Academy Loan Exhibition, 1880. 
 
 PUCK FLEEING BEFORE THE Dawn. (57}in. x 373 in.) 
 The property of Mr James Campbell, Tullichewan Castle. Engraving in line by Mr John Le Conte, given in 
 the present volume. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1838. 
 
 ARIEL AND CALIBAN. (Upright, 39 in. x 46 in.) 
 In the National Gallery, Edinburgh. The property of the Royal Scottish Academy. The etching by Mr W. B. 
 Scott is reproduced in the present volume. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1838. 
 
 AxcnemysticaL ApErr (PARACELSUS) LECTURING ON THE ELIxIrn Virai OR THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE. 
 (72 in. x 60 in.) 
 The property of Mr J. I. Gibson Craig, Edinburgh. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘Selections.’ 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1839. International Exhibition, 1862. Royal Scottish Academy Loan 
 Exhibition, 1863. 
 
 Huse Givinc Necrar To THE Port. (Upright, 24 in. x 30 in.) 
 The property of Mr James B. Gillies, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1839. 
 
 ACHILEES ADDRESSING THE MANES OF PATROCLUS AFTER HAVING SLAIN Hector. (108 in. x 75 in.) 
 The property of the Corporation of Sunderland. Deposited in the Art Gallery, Sunderland. Etched by Mr 
 W. B. Scott in his ‘ Selections.’ 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1839. 
 
 PHILOCTETES LEFT IN THE IsLE OF LEMNOS BY THE GREEKS IN THEIR PROGRESS TOWARDS TROY. 
 (47 in. x 36 in.) 
 The property of Mr George Cousin, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1840. Royal Scottish Academy Loan Exhibition, 1863. 
 
 CUPID SHARPENING HIS Arrows. (19 in. x 15} in.) 
 The property of Dr J. Le Gay Brereton, Sydney. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1840. 
 
 
 
 Tue Crucirrxion. (Small picture.) 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1840. 
 
 Tue Fountain. (About 48 in. x 20 in.) 
 
 QuEEN ELIZABETH VIEWING THE PERFORMANCE oF “THE Merry WIVES OF Winpsor” IN THE GLOBE 
 THEATRE. (108 in. x 72 in.) 
 linburgh. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘Selections,’ 
 
 
 
 The property of the Hon. Lord Young: 
 
 
 

 
 1840. 
 
 1841. 
 
 1842, 
 
 1843. 
 
 CATALOGUE. 39 
 
 Royal Academy Exhibition, 1840. Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1841. Royal Scottish Academy Loan 
 Exhibition, 1880. 
 
 Mary, QUEEN OF SCOTLAND, RECEIVING THE WARRANT FOR HER EXECUTION. (104 in. x 72 in.) 
 The property of Mr D, MacGibbon, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1841. 
 
 Tue Death or JANE SHorE. (67 in. x 57 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1841. 
 
 AvE Maria. 
 
 
 
 Love AND Devotion. (Upright, 304 in. x 404 in.) 
 The property of Signor Felice Giordano, Florence, 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1841. 
 
 THOMAS, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER, HAVING BEEN SECRETLY CARRIED OFF FROM ENGLAND AT THE COMMAND OF 
 Kine Richard THE SECOND, TAKEN TO OALAIS, WHERE HE WAS Murperep. Also titled, THE 
 Trartor’s Gare, (71 in. x 534 in.) 
 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. An engraving in line was begun by Mr James Somerville but never 
 completed. Engraved on wood, from a drawing by Mr W. B. Scott, in ‘Thirty Pictures by Deceased 
 British Artists, engraved especially for the Art Union of London by W. J. Linton,’ 1860. Reproduced in 
 the present volume. 
 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1842. Royal Scottish Academy Loan Exhibitions, 1863 and 1880. 
 
 International Exhibition, 1862. Royal Academy Exhibition of Old Masters, 1875. 
 
 SILENUS PRAISING WINE—APOLLO AND Murcury LISTENERS. 
 International Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1842. 
 
 Tue CHALLENGE. (67 in. x 55 in.) 
 The property of Mr James Leathart, Newcastle. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1842. 
 
 Tue DISCOVERER OF THE PassaGE TO INDIA PASSING THE Cape oF Goop Hopz (Vasco DE Gama). 
 (210 in. x 160 in.) 
 In the Trinity House, Leith. The largest work of the Artist. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘Memoir,’ 1850, 
 and in the present volume. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1849. 
 
 INTERVIEW BETWEEN Ricuarp IIL, THE QUEEN or Epwarp IV., AND THE PRINCES HER SONS, WHOM HE 
 CAUSED TO BE SMOTHERED IN THE TowER. (71 in. x 58 in.) 
 The property of Mr William Carfrae, Port-Seton. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘ Selections.’ 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1843. 
 
 PorTRAIT OF THE Rey. Dr A. L. Srupson, DurBy. (20 in. x 22 in.) 
 
 Tn his possession. 
 
 Tue Four Great Ma‘ b 
 Michael Angelo tracing a portion of the Cartoon of the Daniel on the Vault of the Capella Sistina: Raphael in 
 
 
 
 (Upright, each about 24 in. x 36 in.) 
 
 the Loggia of the Vatican, amidst his Pupils, designing one of the compartments of the roof: Titian painting 
 the Entombment: Correggio painting the St Jerome. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1843. 
 
 From Minron—Tue BeLatep Peasant. (35 in. x 28} in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1843. 
 WAtAcz, THE DEFENDER OF ScoTLAND. (An upright triptych, centre, 29 in. x 38} in.; sides, each 19 in. x 
 33 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1844. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 40 
 
 1843. 
 
 1844, 
 
 1846. 
 
 
 
 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 EQuesTRIAN Portrait oF Mrs Tuomas Weir, with LanpscaPE BackerounD. (75 in. x 57 in.) 
 The property of Mr James Weir, Edinburgh. 
 
 Sm Rocer KirKpaTRICK STABBING JOHN CUMMIN IN THE CLOISTERS OF THE GREYFRIARS’, DUMFRIES. 
 (72 in, x 58 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1844. 
 
 THE BARON IN PEACE. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1844. 
 
 Portrait oF Ropert Burns, AFTER A, NAsmyTH. (12 in. x 16 in.) 
 Painted from the picture in the possession of Mr E. Cathcart of Auchendrane. The property of Mrs Dunlop, 
 Edinburgh. 
 
 May—rue Mercnant’s Tae or Cuaucer. (Upright, 28} in. x 35} in.) 
 The property of Mr A. Muirhead, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1844. 
 
 CurisTIaAN, BunyAN’s PILGRIM, ON THE RoaD OF HIS PitcrimAcE, Also titled, CHRISTIAN INSTRUCTED BY 
 Piety, CHARITY, AND DISCRETION, FROM THE PitGrim’s ProGRess. (72 in. x 594 in.) 
 The property of Mrs Dunlop, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1845. 
 
 Tue Cructrixion—tHe Drap Risinc. (109 in. x 88 in.) 
 The property of Mr James Leathart, Newcastle. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1845. 
 
 Portrait or Dr SamvuEL Brown. (26 in. x 31 in.) 
 The property of Mrs Brown, Edinburgh. 
 
 PETER THE HERMIT PREACHING THE CRUSADES. (72 in. x 60 in.) 
 The property of Mr Charles Jenner, Portobello. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘ Selections.’ 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1846. 
 
 MeEwory. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1846. 
 
 FRAGMENT FROM THE FALL OF THE GIANTS—RHEA BEWAILING THE FALL OF HER TiTaN Sons. (27 in. x 
 28% in.) 
 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1846. 
 
 Dante anp Beatrice. (Upright, 41 in. x 50 in.) 
 The property of Mrs Dunlop, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1846. 
 
 Tue Ascension. (Upright, 17 in. x 36 in.) 
 The property of Mr J. Burn Murdoch, of Gartincaber. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1846. 
 
 PortRAIT or CHARLES Kirkparrick SHARPE, (Bust-portrait, about half life-size.) 
 The property of Mr J. T. Gibson Craig, Edinburgh. 
 
 
 
 
 
 We have been informed that Scott executed a full-length portrait of Kirkpatrick Sharpe. This we have been 
 unable to trace. 
 
 Tue TrrumpH or Love. (71 in. x 59 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh, Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘Selections,’ 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhilition, 1847. Royal Scottish Academy Loan Exhibition, 1880. 
 
 
 
 THE BAPTisM OF CHRIST. 
 
 
 

 
 1846. 
 
 1848. 
 
 CATALOGUE. 41 
 
 The heads of Christ and St John the Baptist (24 in. x 15} in.), cut from this picture, are in the possession of 
 Dr Le Gay Brereton, Sydney. Another portion is in the possession of Miss Boyd, Penkill Castle, Ayrshire. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1848, 
 
 Portrair or J. DunLop or Brocktocu. (36 in. x 48 in.) 
 The property of Mrs Dunlop, Edinburgh. 
 
 QuEEN Mary on THE SCAFFOLD. 
 The property of Mrs White of Netherurd. (?) Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘ Selections,’ 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhilition, 1848. 
 
 DELUSIVE PLEASURES—AN ALLEGORY. (Upright, 24 in. x 29 in.) 
 The property of Dr Littlejohn, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1849. 
 
 CHILDREN FOLLOWING Fortune. (36 in. x 19} in.) 
 The property of Mrs S. Brown, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1848. 
 
 Porrrair or RatpH Watpo Emersoy. (36 in. x 48 in.) 
 In the Public Library, Concord, Mass. A reduced copy by Mr W. B. Scott is in the possession of Mrs S. Brown, 
 Edinburgh. 
 
 MARIUS AND THE EXECUTIONER. 
 
 Domestic ARCADIA, 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhitition, 1849. 
 
 SCENE FROM THE GREAT Fire or LonpoN—A SKETCH. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1849. 
 
 HOPE PASSING OVER THE SKY OF ADveRSITY. (106 in. x 74 in.) 
 The property of Mr D. Nicolson, Edinburgh. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘Selections.’ 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhilition, 1848. 
 
 II.—OIL-PICTURES OF UNASCERTAINED DATE. 
 
 Portrait OF JOHN STIRLING, OF THE RoyAL Bank, EpinpurcH. (24 in. x 30 in.) 
 he property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 
 8 
 
 Tue Wipow’s Memories. (36 in. x 29 in.) 
 The property of Mr William Carfrae, Port-Seton, 
 
 SEA-PIECE. (19 in. x 11 in.) 
 The property of the Rev. Dr A. L. Simpson, Derby. 
 
 Greek Fisuers. (22 in. x 18 in.) 
 The property of Mr John Skelton, Braid Hermitage. A water-colour sketch for this picture is in the possession 
 
 of Mr Thomas Bonnar, Edinburgh. 
 
 SueepPinG Faun. (9 in. x 74 in.) 
 
 
 
 The property of Mrs Fairbairn, Greenlaw. 
 SLEEPING NyMpH, 
 
 Love ACCEPTED. 
 The property of Mrs White of Netherurd. (?) 
 
 ADAH AND AHOLIBAMAH, FRoM Byron’s “CAIN.” 
 
 Faun anp Nympu. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1833. 
 
 
 
 DAVID SCOTT, R.S.A. 
 
 PAN JEALOUS OF A SHEPHERD'S PIPING. 
 Sack or A TowN BY CRUSADERS. 
 OssIAN SINGING THE DEEDS OF HEROES OF OTHER YEARS. 
 
 Tur Dance. (Upright, 19 in. x 35 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 
 DEATH OF AGAMEMNON IN THE Baru. (18}in. x 13 in.) 
 The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh, 
 
 Tur Spirit oF THE Storm. (49 in. x 393 in.) 
 The property of Miss H. A. Watson, Edinburgh. 
 
 Younc Siesprnc Baccuus, with thyrsus and empty wine-goblet lying beside him, (19 in, x 12 in.) 
 The property of Mrs Maitland Makgill Crichton, Edinburgh. 
 
 
 
 IIL—SOME WORKS IN WATER-COLOUR, TEMPERA, AND FRESCO. 
 
 Parruran ArcuEer. (38 in. x 45 in.) 
 Fresco. The property of Mrs Dunlop, Edinburgh. 
 Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition, 1841. 
 
 Srupy or Parr or Micwarn ANGELO’s “Last JupGMEnr” IN THE Sistine, (30 in, x 24 in.) 
 Pencil, washed with water-colour. The property of Mrs D. O. Hill, Edinburgh. 
 
 NAPOLEON ASSAILED BY THE GuHosTS OF HIS VICTIMS IN HADES, (17 in. x 12 in.) 
 Drawing in light and shade. The property of the Misses Harvey, Edinburgh. 
 
 Lapy MAceru. 
 Large competition design in body-colours for tapestry. 
 
 DRAKE ON THE QUARTER-DECK—DESTRUCTION OF THE ARMADA. 
 Competition Cartoon. Etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘ Selections.’ 
 
 SATAN SPRINGING FROM THE Ear oF Eve aT THE TOUCH oF IrHuRrEr’s Spear, (19 in. x 24 in.) 
 Drawing in light and shade. The property of Dr A. Woodcock, Anstruther. 
 
 Tue First-Born. (11 in. x 124 in.) 
 Water-colour. The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 
 ARCADIAN Dance. (18 in. x 14 in.) 
 Water-colour. The property of Mr R. Carfrae, Edinburgh. 
 Another water-colour version of the subject (18 in. x 12 in.) is in the possession of Mr Allan Park Paton, 
 
 Greenock. 
 
 Portrait or THE Rev. Mr Farrpairn, (154in, x 123.) 
 Water-colour. The property of Mrs Fairbairn, Greenlaw. 
 
 Scene From Macseru. (387 in. x 46 in.) 
 Fresco. The property of Miss H. A. Watson, Edinburgh. 
 
 WATCHMEN. 
 
 Fresco. 
 
 SELF-ACCUSATION; OR, MAN AND HIS ConsCIENCE. (9}in. x 11} in.) 
 Water-colour. The property of Mr W. B. Scott. Reproduced in colour in the present volume. 
 
 Portion oF A SCENE FROM OsstAN. (Upright, 32 in. x 43 in.) 
 
 Fresco. Removed from Scott’s studio walls. The property of Mr John Bonnar, Edinburgh. 
 
 
 
 
 
CATALOGUE. 43 
 
 THE Sons or Gop AND THE DAUGHTERS OF Men. (Each 93 in. x 7 in.) 
 Se 
 
 
 
 es of four Water-colours. In the possession of Mr W. B, Scott. Five pencil-drawings for this series are in 
 the possession of Dr J. Le Gay Brereton, Sydney. 
 
 THe SEVEN Srrincs oF THE Lyre. (224 in. x 18 in.) 
 
 Water-colour. In the possession of Mr W. B. Scott. 
 
 IV.—PUBLISHED DESIGNS. 
 
 For a year or two in his youth Scott learned and practised engraving under his father, but his 
 work of this period, being unsigned, is for the most part impossible of identification. We are informed, 
 however, that he executed several designs after Stothard for Thomson’s musical publications. 
 
 The Monograms of Man, six plates designed and etched by Scott, were published by Constable 
 in 1831. They are reproduced in the present volume. Studies in pencil and chalk for various of the 
 subjects are in the possession of Mr W. B. Scott and Mr D. Nicolson, Edinburgh. 
 
 The twenty-five Illustrations to the Ancient Mariner were designed in 1831, and the etchings, 
 by the artist himself, were published by Hugh Paton in 1837. One of the subjects, etched in a smaller 
 size by the artist, is given in the ‘ Memoir’ by his brother. Two of them are reproduced in the present 
 volume. 
 
 In 1832 he contributed five small plates to ‘The Casquet of Literary Gems, edited by Mr 
 Alexander Whitelaw, and published by Messrs Blackie & Sons. They illustrate Irvine’s “ Belated 
 Travellers,” Maturin’s “ Story of a Parricide,” Byron’s “ Manfred” and his “ Leila,” and Scott's “ Fortunes 
 of Nigel.” They are marked as designed by David Scott and engraved by Robert Scott; but Mr Le 
 Conte, a pupil of the latter’s, assures us that the illustrations, or at least their figures, were engraved as 
 well as designed by David Scott, and bore the name of his father merely as the head of the firm. A 
 vignette of January and May was engraved under the direction of Mr W. B. Scott as an illustra- 
 tion to a proposed volume of select poetry. 
 
 In 1833 Scott made a drawing from an old portrait of George Buchanan, in the University 
 Library, Edinburgh, which was engraved by S. Freeman and published by Messrs Blackie & Sons, 
 in Chambers’s ‘ Biographies of Eminent Scotsmen.’ He also etched from his own pencil-drawing a 
 
 subject entitled Mever,—a figure struggling with coiling snakes, and watched by the pitying faces of 
 
 
 
 friends. It was a memorial of an illness from which the artist had himself suffered. 
 
 In 1837 Scott executed several large rough outline etchings, in the “ soft-ground” method, from 
 figures and groups in Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment, intending them to accompany his essay on that 
 artist, which eventually appeared in ‘ Blackwood’s Magazine.’ These etchings were never published, 
 and impressions are seldom to be met with. We have seen four of the subjects. 
 
 About 1842 Mr John Le Conte executed a line engraving of The Expulsion, from a sepia drawing 
 by Seott, as a frontispiece to an illustrated Bible published by William Mackenzie of Glasgow. 
 
 The Forty Designs to the ‘ Pilgrim's Progress’ were sketched by David Scott in 1841. The series 
 was etched by Mr W. B. Scott after his brother’s death, and published in 1850 by Messrs A. 
 Fullerton & Co. In 1859 twenty-five illustrations were published to the Second Part of the 
 ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ both designed and etched by Mr W. B. Scott; and in subsequent editions the 
 whole sixty-five plates were issued in one volume, A few of the original drawings for the First Part 
 
 of the ‘ Pilgrim’s Progress’ are in the possession of Mr R. Carfrae; but the majority—thirty-two in 
 
 M 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 SS 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 44 DAVID SCOTT, R.8.A. 
 
 Thomas Dixon to the Sunderland Free Library, the authorities of 
 
 
 
 number 
 which have kindly permitted us to reproduce two of the most striking subjects in the present volume. 
 
 were presented by Mr 
 
 One of them, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, was engraved on wood by Mr W. J. Linton— 
 as an illustration to William Cullen Bryant’s ‘ Thanatopsis,’ 
 
 
 
 altered by him to suit the different subject 
 published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. 
 
 The Highteen Astronomical Designs were drawn by Scott in 1848. Eleven of them were engraved 
 by Mr W. B. Scott and by Mr R. G. Bell, and published in 1850, by J. W. Parker, in a very scarce 
 edition of the late Professor J. P. Nichol’s ‘ Architecture of the Heavens.’ One of the subjects given 
 in this volume—The Procession of Unknown Powers—was etched by Mr W. B. Scott in his ‘ Memoir,’ 
 It was also altered and engraved on wood by Mr W. J. Linton, as a book-plate for a friend; and the 
 block was afterwards printed as an illustration on the title-page of Mr Linton’s ‘Rare Poems of 
 the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ (Roberts, Boston; and Kegan Paul & Co., London: 1883). 
 Our reproductions are from the original drawings, which exist in varying versions, in the possession 
 of Mr W. B. Scott, Professor John Nichol of Glasgow, and Mrs Fairbairn of Greenlaw. 
 
 In our list of oil-pictures we have already indicated those which were engraved. The etchings in 
 the Selection from the Works of the late David Scott, R.S.A., published by the Glasgow Art Union 
 in 1852-53, and again in a second edition in 1866-67, were executed by Mr W. B. Scott, we believe 
 from pencil reductions by Mr Cormack Brown, Mr J. C. Brown, and other draughtsmen. In addition 
 to transcripts from oil-pictures, they include reproductions of a drawing and of a large cartoon— 
 Bruce Watching for the Signal Lights from the Carrick Coast, and Drake on the Quarter-deck. Mx 
 W. B. Scott’s volume of ‘Poems, published in 1875, contains a small etching by the author from a 
 desion by David Scott, entitled, Pax Vobiscum—a Satire. It forms one of a series of nine unpub- 
 
 lished drawings in pencil by the artist, illustrative of his brother's poem of “ Anthony.” 
 
 LIST OF PORTRAITS OF DAVID SCOTT, RSA. 
 
 
 
 Bust iv Marsie. By Sir John Steell, R.S.A. 
 The property of the Royal Scottish Academy. Plate No. 1. 
 
 CasINer-sizE Portrait. By R.S. Lauder, R.S.A. 
 The property of Sir A. Trevelyan, Bart., Nettlecombe Court, Somerset. 
 
 CaBINET-sIZE Porrratt. By Charles Lees, R.S.A. 
 The property of the Royal Scottish Academy. 
 
 LIFE-S 
 
 
 
 & Portrait. By the Artist himself, 1832. 
 The property of Mr Jas. Leathart, Newcastle, 
 
 Pencrn-Drawine. By C. Heath Wilson, Rome, 1833. 
 The property of Mr W. B, Scott. 
 
 Pencit-Drawina. By W. B. Scott, taken two days before the death of David Scott. 
 
 The property of the Artist, who has executed from it an unpublished etching. 
 
 In addition to the above bust, oil-paintings, and drawings, two calotype portraits of David Scott 
 
 exist,—that of which the head is reproduced in our Plate, No. 29, and another. 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 CATALOGUE. 45 
 
 LIST OF WORKS AND MAGAZINE ARTICLES RELATING TO 
 DAVID SCOTT, RSA. 
 
 Memoir of David Scott, R.S.A, Containing his Journals in Italy, Notes on Art, and other Papers. With seven 
 Illustrations, by William B. Scott. (A. & C. Black, 1850.) 
 
 Selections from the Works of David Scott, R.S.A. Etched by his brother W. B. Scott. (Art Union of Glasgow 1852-53.) 
 Contains a brief Memoir of the Artist, which is printed, with alterations, in the second edition, 1866-67. 
 
 Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Iustrated by David Scott, R.S.A., with a Life of the Artist and Descriptive Notices of the 
 Plates by Rey. A. L. Simpson, D.D., Derby. (I. Nelson & Sons, 1883.) 
 
 Chapter on “the Plates” in Professor J. P. Nichol’s illustrated edition of The Architecture of the Heavens. (J. W. 
 Parker, 1850.) 
 
 
 
 Review of W. B, Scott’s Memoir, reprinted from Scotsman of 6th April 1850, in Selections from the Literary and Artistic 
 Remains of Lady Paulina Jermyn Trevelyan. (Longmans, 1879.) 
 
 Review of W. B. Scott's Memoir in The Christian Observer, vol. li. p. 624. 
 
 David Scott, by Mrs Charles Heaton, at p. 391 of vol. iii, of her edition of Cunningham’s Lives of British Painters. (G. 
 Bell & Sons, 1880.) 
 
 At p. 322 of Gleanings in the Fields of Art, by Ednah D. Cheney. (Lee & Shepard, Boston, 1881.) 
 
 Reprinted from North British Review, No. XXL, in vol. ii. of Dr Samuel Brown’s Lectures. (T. Constable 
 & Co., 1858.) 
 Hogg’s Instructor, New Series, vol. iii. p. 136. 
 The Monograms and Ancient Mariner of David Scott. By Dy Samuel Brown. Hogg’s Instructor, New Series, vol. iii. 
 
 Pp. Won: 
 
 David Scott. By W. J. Linton, Art Jowrnal, vol. ii. p. 120. 
 
 By J. W. Ebsworth, in a series of papers on Our Scottish Artists. Maephail’s Edinburgh Ecclesiastical 
 
 Journal, vol. xxvii. pp. 65 and 193. 
 in Monthly Religious Magazine (Boston), vol. xix. p. 106. 
 x Littell’s Living Age (Boston), vol. xxv. p. 163. 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, vol. cxxx. p.589. Reprinted in a revised and augmented form in the present volume, 
 
 Interesting references to David Scott will be found in D. G. Rossetti’s supplementary chapter to 
 Gilchrist’s Life of Blake (Macmillan & Co.); in Dr A. L. Simpson’s article on “Art in Relation to 
 its Ideal Element,” Lowe's Hdinburgh Magazine, April 1848; in the Rey. Dr George Gilfillan’s His- 
 tory of a Man, p. 200 (Arthur Hall, Virtue, & Co.); and in Dr J. Le Gay Brereton’s Travels of 
 
 Prince Legion and other Poems (Longmans & Co.) 
 
 Lectures on the Life and Works of David Scott were delivered at Bradford by Dr Brereton, and in 
 1868 at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, by the Rev. Dr Simpson. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
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