April 2026
Emily Learmont published an article in the Burlington Magazine on Scott’s “History of the art of pottery” windows in the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A Museum).
October 2025
The Brooklyn Museum is presenting its blockbuster exhibition Monet and Venice from October 2025 to February 2026. The exhibition then travels to the de Young Museum in San Francisco, where it is on display from March to July 2026. The exhibition includes William Bell Scott’s watercolor Venice, Horses of St. Mark’s (1862), on loan from storage in the V&A. Imagine my surprise when I turned the corner in the Monet exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum and saw Scott’s watercolor of the horses of St. Mark’s!
May 2025
The Laing Gallery in Newcastle opened an exhibition, With These Hands: Paintings of Making and Mending, which runs to September. It includes Scott’s watercolor version of Hexham Market Place (1853).
November 2023
Emily Learmont, who is writing her dissertation on William Bell Scott in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, published her short book, A Pre-Raphaelite Romance, about Scott’s King’s Quair screen. The book is highly successful, both in its text and its beautiful reproductions of the screen. I recommend it highly. Learmont also appeared on the podcast of the Pre-Raphaelite Society to discuss her work on the screen.
September 2023
The National Gallery of Scotland completed its long-running renovations and re-opened its Scottish galleries. This includes, of course, Scott’s Una and the Lion (1860) and The Nativity (1872), which were highlights of the permanent exhibition before the renovation. The grand innovation, however, is the inclusion of the King’s Quair screen (1867-68). Scott created this screen for his patron James Leathart, based on Scott’s King’s Quair murals in the winding staircase at Alice Boyd’s castle at Penkill. I’ve not yet been to the re-opened Scottish galleries but am looking forward to it.
May 2023
William Bell Scott’s watercolor Women Looking Out for Their Husbands and Brothers (1866-68) sold at auction at Elstob in Yorkshire. This is a watercolor version of one of Scott’s designs (no. 16) for Chevy Chase on the spandrils at Wallington Hall. This watercolor used to belong to Sheila Pettit, who worked for the National Trust.
April 2023
William Bell Scott considered the Westminster Hall competition of 1843 to be one of the most important events of his life. His large cartoon entry was previously known only through an engraving printed in the London Illustrated News (August 1843) and a pen and ink drawing in the Penkill albums in the Scottish National Gallery. In April 2023, a watercolor study came to market, previously sold at Sotheby’s in 1978 but misidentified by Sotheby’s then, and again by Anderson & Garland in Newcastle in 2023, as being by Scott’s brother, David Scott. I was fortunate to recognize what the watercolor was and acquire it. This is a significant new source of information about Scott’s Westminster Hall entry.
December 2022
William Bell Scott’s fairy painting The Barge of the Fairy Mab (1845) sold at auction at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh. This is a gorgeous gem of a painting, which had not been seen publicly since its original exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh in 1845 and a follow-on exhibition at the West of Scotland Exhibition in Glasgow that same year. The painting apparently hung for many years in a private collection in Careston Castle, Angus, near Dundee.
December 2022
William Bell Scott’s chalk Portrait of Ellen Epps (1846) sold in an online auction at Christie’s. While the auction house did not identify the sitter and sold the drawing as Portrait Study of a Young Woman, it is probable that the sitter was Letitia Scott’s best friend, Ellen Epps. The provenance of the painting is through Laura Alma-Tadema, Ellen Epps’ niece, who married Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
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.
Spring 2022
Emily Learmont published her study of William Bell Scott’s Una and the Lion (1860) in The British Art Journal.
March 2022
The Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle is presenting an exhibition entitled Liquid Light: Painting in Watercolours from March to 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.
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