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William Bell Scott

2 of 2 portraits by Frederick Bacon Barwell

William Bell Scott, by Frederick Bacon Barwell, 1877 -NPG 6105 - © National Portrait Gallery, London

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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William Bell Scott

by Frederick Bacon Barwell
Oil on canvas, 1877
20 1/8 in. x 16 in. (517 mm x 415 mm)
NPG 6105

Inscriptionback to top

On reverse of canvas inscr. in paint top right: ‘W.B. SCOTT / Painted by F.B.BARWELL / Penkill 6 Octr 1877.’;
and stencilled: ‘FR… / WOOD & Co / 190 / BROMPTON ROAD / LONDON SW’;
and on stretcher stencilled: ‘KRS SG’;
and inscr. in chalk: ‘Lot 276 2.11.90’ and ‘KR886 NCP’.

This portraitback to top

According to the inscription on the back of the canvas the portrait was painted at Penkill on 6 October 1877. From the 1860s William Bell Scott, his wife Letitia and Alice Boyd of Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, had lived as a ménage à trois, with winters spent in the Scotts’ home in London and ‘late summer and autumn months at Penkill’. [1] In 1877 Scott was in his mid-sixties. He had ceased to exhibit though continued to make etchings, and he was an examiner at London art schools. His current reputation was more literary than artistic; he was an acclaimed poet (see Poems, 1875), an editor (of Sir Walter Scott’s Poetical Works, 1877) and the author of many art publications. [2]

There is no mention of Frederick Bacon Barwel or of this portrait, NPG 6105, in Scott’s memoirs, Autobiographical Notes. Barwell, a younger generation Norwich School artist at this time working in London, was a close friend of John Everett Millais and later of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton. A reliable painter of tender-hearted genre scenes, he exhibited without interruption at the Royal Academy between 1855 and 1887. [3]

There was, however, one place where Scott and Barwell must certainly have met and this was the South Kensington Museum. After Scott ceased to be master of the Government School of Design in Newcastle and came to London, he did related work for the Board of Trade at South Kensington: ‘When in 1864 [Scott ] returned once more to London, he continued his connection with the department at South Kensington as artist employed in decoration, and as examiner in art schools, till 1885’. [4] Barwell was another such public servant, working as a senior inspector in the Department of Science and Art. He was also the author of decorative schemes at South Kensington and around 1867–8 he designed a mosaic portrait of the painter William Mulready for the new museum buildings. [5] Scott and Barwell were therefore colleagues from the 1860s.

Barwell’s portrait of Scott is essentially a private image, perhaps commissioned by Alice Boyd. However, it is also, together with a self-portrait and a likeness by David Scott (see ‘All known portraits, Self-portraits, 1867’ and ‘By other artists, c.1832’), one of the three main oil portraits of Scott. Here he looks watchfully to the right, seemingly oblivious to the process of portrait-making. Certainly his saturnine looks had been dealt a blow when in 1863, due to an illness, he lost all his hair (see Fanny Cornforth’s exclamation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘O my, Mr. Scott is changed! He ain’t got a hye-brow or a hye-lash – not a ’air on his ’ead!’). [6] From around 1863 Scott is always shown wearing a wig or a hat or both.

The portrait was still at Penkill Castle in the 1980s, though later ‘a succession of dealers’ persuaded the last of the family to sell ‘important paintings and drawings’. [7] It was already out of Penkill and owned by John Shotton, book dealer, Durham, in February 1990.[8] The portrait was purchased at a Christie’s sale on 2 November 1990, two years before the sale of Penkill and its remaining contents on 15 December 1992.

Carol Blackett-Ord

Footnotesback to top

1) Scott 1892, vol.2, p.73.
2) See Bayne 1897 for a detailed list of Scott’s publications.
3) See Allthorpe-Guyton & Stevens 1982, pp.53–6. For Barwell’s connexion with Millais in 1855, see Millais 1899, vol.1, pp.250–51.
4) Bayne 1897.
5) Allthorpe-Guyton & Stevens 1982, pp.53–6.
6) ‘Down to Chelsea and find D.G. Rossetti painting … I stay for dinner and we talk about the old P.R.Bs. Enter Fanny Cornforth who says something of W.B. Scott which amuses us. Scott was a dark hairy man, but after an illness has reappeared quite bald. Fanny exclaimed, “O my, Mr. Scott is changed! He ain’t got a hye-brow or a hye-lash – not a ’air on his ’ead!”; William Allingham, A Diary, 1907, p.100.
7) See SNPG Photographic inventory, H.3341, copy NPG NoC (Penkill Castle). See also The Times, 11 Aug. 1992, p.12; and M. Hall, ‘Penkill Castle, Ayrshire’, Country Life, 21 Mar. 1991, p.118.
8) Note on mount, NPG SB (Scott).

Physical descriptionback to top

Quarter-length slightly to right, looking right, with grey curly hair under black cap, wearing black jacket and tie, pink rose in lapel

Conservationback to top

Conserved, 1994.

Provenanceback to top

Penkill Castle; Evelyn May Courtney-Boyd, 1980s; John Shotton; Christie’s, 2 November 1990, lot 276, bt. Leggatt’s for the NPG.

Exhibitionsback to top

Christina Rossetti, NPG, London, 1994 (no catalogue).

Reproductionsback to top

Christie’s, 1–2 November 1990 (276).

View all known portraits for William Bell Scott