News | William Bell Scott

July 2022

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has announced its exhibition The Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours (see May 2021, below) will be on display again from July to November 2022. This is a great opportunity for those who may have missed the original exhibition last year due to the COVID pandemic.

March 2022

The Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle is presenting an exhibition entitled Liquid Light: Painting in Watercolours from now until August 2022. William Bell Scott’s beautiful watercolor Lake Nemi (1862) is included in the exhibition.

October 2021

Victoria Hepburn, who is writing her dissertation on William Bell Scott in the History of Art department at Yale University, gave a lively and well-received talk at the University of Delaware (which was viewable virtually) on Scott’s King’s Quair murals at Penkill Castle. Hepburn was selected as the 2021 Amy P. Goldman Fellow in Pre-Raphaelite Studies.

September 2021

William Bell Scott’s watercolor Enchanted Corner sold in an online auction at Christie’s. The aesthetic collectors Peter Rose and Albert Gallichan had acquired the watercolor at a Phillips sale in London in 1992, the only time this watercolor had been on the market previously.

May 2021

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included William Bell Scott’s pencil portrait of the feminist reformer Josephine Butler in its exhibition, The Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours. The Ashmolean acquired this drawing, which used to belong to Scott scholar William E. Fredeman, in 2016.

June 2020

Lucy West published an article in the Journal of Art Historiography on Pauline, Lady Trevelyan’s collaboration with John Ruskin and William Bell Scott to create the central hall at Wallington Hall in Northumberland, now a National Trust property, where Scott’s great history paintings of English-Scottish border history are on display. West drew for her article on the Trevelyan Papers in the Robinson Library at Newcastle University.

June 2020

Elisa Bizzotto, professor of English literature at Iuav University in Venice, published a study of William Bell Scott’s poem “Morning Sleep” in Eleonara Sasso, ed., Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge (Anthem Press), pp. 101-122. Bizzotto studies the poem, which appeared in The Germ in 1850, in the context of orientalism. Bizzotto previously wrote on “Morning Sleep” in her 2012 book, The Germ: Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interart Aesthetics (Peter Lang), co-authored with Paolo Spinozzi.

February 2019

William Bell Scott’s large oil painting The Norns, from 1876, was sold at auction at Bonhams in London. The painting fetched £75,000, the second-highest amount paid at auction for a Scott painting. The painting, which is in its original frame designed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s assistant Henry Treffry Dunn, hung at Penkill Castle until 1992. Scott’s etching, after this painting, was published in The Etcher in 1879.

June 2018

William Bell Scott’s watercolor Thou Hast Left Me Ever, Jamie was sold at auction at Christie’s in London. The watercolor, after the Robert Burns poem, was first exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1872.

November 2017

William Bell Scott’s posthumous portrait of his sister Helen (1813-1828) was sold at auction at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh. This painting, which previously was unknown, is in a Romantic style, influenced by the painter’s and subject’s elder brother, David Scott.

October 2017

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s pencil drawings of William Bell Scott (October 1852) and Alice Boyd (December 1862) were sold at auction at Dominic Winter in Cirencester, Gloucestershire. These drawings were purchased from Penkill Castle in 1967, and since then have been in a private collection except for their inclusion in the 1973 Rossetti exhibition at the Royal Academy. The drawings sold for a good price, £44,000 and £26,000, respectively.

March 2017

Michaela Giebelhausen’s book Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Victorian Britain (originally published in 2006) has appeared in paperback with Routledge. The book includes a good discussion of William Bell Scott’s illustrations for the Fullarton Bible (reproduced on this website here).

August 2016

Matthew C. Potter’s book The Inspirational Genius of Germany: British Art and Germanism, 1850–1939 (originally published in 2012) has appeared in paperback with Manchester University Press. The book includes a good discussion of Scott in the chapter on “Pre-Raphaelite Germanism: Ford Madox Brown and His Circle.”

May 2016

Richard Hingley of Durham University previously had a good discussion of William Bell Scott’s Wallington painting, “Building the Roman Wall” (1857), in Hadrian’s Wall: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2012). Hingley has now extended his analysis of the painting in an article entitled “Constructing the Nation and Empire: Victorian and Edwardian Images of the Building and Roman Fortifications,” which is included in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and the Idea of Nationalism in the 19th Century (De Gruyter, 2016).

November 2014

William Bell Scott’s large oil painting “News from Paris–1793–Death of the King” (1877) sold at auction at Skanes Auktionsverk in Landskrona, Sweden. The painting was previously offered for sale at Sotheby’s as “attributed to” Scott, but a drawing in Scott’s notebooks in the National Galleries of Scotland confirms that the painting is by Scott. The painting is one of Scott’s last large-scale paintings, and is unusual for its social realism.

June 2014

Rosemary Mitchell of Leeds Trinity University has published an important new article on William Bell Scott’s series of historical paintings at Wallington Hall. The article, entitled “Marginal Masculinities: Regional and Gender Borders in William Bell Scott’s Wallington Scheme,” is part of a collection edited by Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge, entitled Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature (Routledge). Mitchell provides a thoughtful account of the type of heroism that Scott depicts in the Wallington pictures.

May 2014

Princeton University Library has announced the acquisition of the William E. Fredeman Collection of William Bell Scott, the Scott Family and Alice Boyd. These papers belonged to the late Professor Fredeman of the University of British Columbia. The manuscripts are particularly notable for the drafts of William Bell Scott’s last book of poetry, A Poet’s Harvest Home (1882; expanded edition 1893). These new papers enhance Princeton’s existing pre-Raphaelite manuscript collections.

2013

The Victoria and Albert Museum has restored and re-installed William Bell Scott’s stained-glass windows in the Lecture Theatre staircase landings. Scott designed the windows in 1867-69, but they were removed and placed in storage shortly before the First World War. Twenty-two of the original 24 panels survive. The windows in the western staircase depict classical subjects, and those in the eastern staircase scenes from the lives of Giotto and Raphael. See here for a discussion of the conservation by Sherrie Eatman. The windows are made using an unusual grisaille technique in which yellow is the only color. They look gorgeous in place and are well worth a detour for anyone visiting the V&A.