Works in Progress: The Art of William Bell Scott (1811-1890)
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Barringer, Tim
Abstract
As an innovative painter, muralist, and designer; a poet and illustrator; head of a regional Government School of Design and writer of instructional books; an art advisor, art historian, and critic, the Scottish artist William Bell Scott (1811-1890), occupied and invigorated a sweeping multiplicity of Victorian art worlds, often approaching movements, institutions, and conventions with lively contrarianism. His artistic, literary, and professional affiliations bridged institutional and avant-garde boundaries; traversed Great Britain; and spanned much of the nineteenth century. This dissertation positions Scott as a central and generative figure within nineteenth-century British art, focusing, in particular, on his site-specific works. When viewed through the contexts of his wider career, his broader artistic and literary oeuvres, and his network of associations, these works are found to offer a distinctive, self-reflexive vision of his era by interrogating and contributing to Victorian ideas of progress. The notion of progress held multiple valences in nineteenth-century Britain, each of which had a profound impact on the visual arts. The first chapter considers the interior of the central court at Wallington Hall in Northumberland, a collaboration with Pauline Trevelyan. The multi-register decorative program, whose subject is the history of northeastern England, comprises a striated aggregation of mid-nineteenth-century British concepts and visualizations of history (cultural, natural, and political). It amounts to a critical summation of the era’s historical theories and evinces, so Scott believed, a comprehensive knowledge uniquely achievable in his modern, progressive age. The second chapter analyzes Scott’s best-known painting, In the Nineteenth Century the Northumbrians Show the World What can be Done with Iron and Coal, the last of eight monumental canvases Scott produced for Wallington’s lower level. It comprises an alternative mode of Pre-Raphaelitism; indeed, a “pragmatic Pre-Raphaelitism,” which reflexively acknowledges the material conveniences of the modern world. Paradoxically for a site-specific work, the painting contains allusions within its iconography and composition to its mobility and evinces an awareness of its multiple exhibition contexts in Newcastle, Wallington Hall, and London. The third chapter addresses Scott’s mural depicting the medieval poem The King’s Quair, produced in collaboration with Alice Boyd. The vast, panoramic painting corkscrews around the spiral staircase at Penkill Castle in southwestern Scotland. While the first chapter investigated Scott’s engagements with history and progress in striated registers, and the second in a single canvas, this chapter considers the multiple resonances of a monumental, Victorian progress charted on a spiral.
Recommended Citation
Hepburn, Victoria, "Works in Progress: The Art of William Bell Scott (1811-1890)" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1273.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1273
