Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/25

 themes as time, death, and eternity. When about nineteen his father's health broke down, and for a short time he had to turn to engraving as a means of support for the family; but his heart was fixed upon imaginative design, and in a sketch, inscribed ‘Character of David Scott, 1826,’ he has represented himself seated at the engraving-table with clenched hands and an expression of despair. He was soon allowed to have his way, and was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Life Academy Association in 1827. He set to work on a huge picture of ‘Lot and his Daughters fleeing from the Cities of the Plain,’ not finished till 1829. In 1828 he exhibited at the Scottish Academy ‘The Hopes of Early Genius dispelled by Death.’ To these pictures he added ‘Fingal, or the Spirit of Lodi,’ ‘The Death of Sappho,’ and ‘Wallace defending Scotland’ (a small work), before he was elected an associate of the Scottish Academy in 1830. In 1831 he published six Blake-like designs in outline, under the title of ‘Monograms of Man,’ and in the same year he commenced twenty-five outline illustrations to Coleridge's ‘Ancient Mariner.’ These designs, which are of extraordinary power and in close sympathy with the weird imagination of the poet, were published by Mr. A. Hill of Edinburgh, and by Ackermann in London in 1837, but did not meet with the recognition they deserved. In 1832 he contributed five small plates to ‘The Casquet of Literary Gems,’ and exhibited at the Scottish Academy ‘Sarpedon carried by Death and Sleep,’ ‘Nimrod,’ ‘Pan,’ ‘Aurora,’ and a sketch of ‘Burying the Dead.’ In the same year his picture of ‘Lot’ was rejected at the British Institution on account of its size. In the autumn of 1832 he went to Italy, where fresh disappointment awaited him. He was satisfied with none of the great masters. The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel appeared to him ‘powerfully executed but full of defects.’ His industry in Italy was prodigious, but his health was very weak. Early in 1833 he executed a series of very careful anatomical drawings from subjects in the hospital of the Incurabile, but the principal result of his visit abroad was an immense picture of ‘Discord,’ which was meant to typify by the rebellion of son against father the overthrow of the old order by the new. It was exhibited at the Scottish Academy in 1840 together with ‘Philoctetes left in the Isle of Lemnos,’ ‘Cupid sharpening his Arrows,’ and ‘The Crucifixion.’ In the same year he sent to the exhibition of the Royal Academy the first of several pictures which he now painted from subjects in national history. This was ‘Queen Elizabeth at the Globe Theatre viewing the Performance of “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”’ It was hung high and passed unnoticed, a circumstance which, coupled with the rejection, two years before, of his ‘Achilles addressing the Manes of Patroclus,’ prevented him from ever sending another work to the London exhibitions, with the exception of ‘Pan’ in 1845. Soon after his return to Scotland he set up a large studio at Easter Dalry House, near Edinburgh, where he painted ‘Peter the Hermit preaching the Crusades,’ ‘The Alchemist lecturing on the Elixir Vitæ,’ an altar-piece of ‘The Descent from the Cross’ for the catholic chapel in Edinburgh, and a number of other historical and poetical pictures. One of the latter, a small picture of ‘The Duke of Gloucester taken into the Water Gate of Calais,’ was lent by Mr. R. Carfrae, who bought a great many of his works, to the winter exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1875. In Edinburgh his remarkable powers attracted a considerable circle of enthusiastic admirers and friends, among whom were the Rev. George Gilfillan, Dr. John Brown, author of ‘Rab and his Friends,’ whose portrait he painted; Mrs. Catherine Crowe (‘Night Side of Nature’), and Professor John Pringle Nichol [q. v.] He also received visits from Margaret Fuller and Emerson, whose portrait he painted. This is now in the Public Library at Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

In 1839 and 1840 he contributed to ‘Blackwood's Magazine’ a series of articles, mainly occupied with the spirit and motives of art. The first was called ‘The Peculiarities of Thought and Style,’ and the others were upon Raphael, Titian, Leonardo, the Caracci, and Caravaggio. A fragment of another upon ‘Rubens, his Contemporaries, and Modern Painters,’ was published, together with a ‘Memoir’ (1850), by his brother, W. B. Scott.

In 1841 he commenced a great picture, now in the Trinity House at Leith, called ‘Vasco de Gama, the discoverer of India, encountering the Spirit of the Storm as he passes the Cape of Good Hope.’ It was exhibited by the artist, but the venture resulted in a loss of 70l. In 1842 he sent two cartoons to the competition for the paintings in the new Houses of Parliament—‘Drake witnessing the Destruction of the Armada’ and ‘Wallace defending Scotland’—but neither these nor the two frescoes he sent in two years later attracted any notice. He also published a pamphlet entitled ‘British, French, and German Painting, being a reference to the points which render the pro-