Scott, David, R.S.A., a painter of distinct originality and great imaginative power, was born in Edinburgh on the 10th or 12th of October 1806. He was a grave, silent boy, fond of drawing; probably a copy of Blake's 'Illustrations to the Grave' was not without effect in influencing the especial direction of his art. He studied in the Trustees' Academy, under Andrew Wilson, and was apprenticed to his father as a line-engraver. The impetus towards original work, however, was too strong to be resisted, and he determined to devote himself to painting. In 1828 he exhibited his first picture, 'The Hopes of Early Genius dispelled by Death,' in the Royal Institution, Edinburgh; and in the following year he was admitted a member of the recently formed Scottish Academy. The poetical subject of 'Adam and Eve singing their Morning Hymn' dates from 1829; and in 1831 he produced his vigorous personification of 'Nimrod the Mighty Hunter,' and his rendering of 'The Dead Sarpedon borne by Sleep and Death.' In the same year he published six etched plates, 'The Monograms of Man,' a series of profound symbolical inventions, and designed his twenty-five 'Illustrations to the Ancient Mariner,' etched and published in 1837, which seize with a wonderful force and intensity the weird conceptions of Coleridge's great poem. In 1832 he visited Italy, and remained in Rome for fifteen months, studying the old masters, and painting 'The Vintager,' now in the National Gallery, and other works. His impressions of the art of Italy were embodied in a series of papers published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1839-41. In his twenty-eighth year he returned to Edinburgh, and, amid much discouragement from the almost complete want of popular sympathy or interest in his work, he produced his 'Alchemistical Adept (Paracelsus) Lecturing' (1838), now in the National Gallery of Scotland; 'Queen Elizabeth at the Globe Theatre' (1840); and 'The Traitor's Gate' (1841), one of the quietest, most impressive, and entirely satisfactory of his paintings. The following year saw the completion of 'Vasco da Gama encountering the Spirit of the Cape,' a colossal gallery work, over 16 feet in length, now in the Trinity House, Leith. Meanwhile the artist's health had been failing, and the want of appreciation had been chilling him to the heart. Year by year his life became more withdrawn and saddened, and he died before he had reached the age of forty-three, on the 5th of March 1849. His forty designs to the Pilgrim's Progress, executed in 1841, were published in 1850, and eleven of his remarkable and daringly imaginative Astronomical Designs, drawn in 1848, were engraved in an edition of Professor J. P. Nichol's Architecture of the Heavens (1850). In spite of their frequently hurried execution and consequent faults of detail, Scott's works, on their technical side, have much of the large and powerful draughtsmanship and of the rich and dignified colouring that characterise the productions of the old masters. Their highest value, however, lies in their imaginative quality, in their power and originality as inventions. In his own words, Scott 'always judged painting by its sentiment, by its mental bearing, and thought most of new spheres of meaning.'
See the Memoir by his brother W. B. Scott (Edin. 1850); Selections from his Works, edited by his brother (Glasgow, 1866-67); and the monograph by the present writer (Edin. 1884).
His brother, WILLIAM BELL SCOTT, painter and poet, was born at St Leonards, Edinburgh, September 12, 1811, and was educated at Edinburgh High School. He studied art both at Edinburgh and London, settled in London in 1836, but exhibited only twenty pictures from 1840 down till 1869. The subjects of these were mostly historical or poetical. From 1843 till about 1858 he lived at Newcastle, in charge of the government school of art there, and down till 1865 he acted as one of the South Kensington examiners. His most important work in painting was the series of eight large pictures illustrative of Northumbrian history at Wallington Hall, completed later by eighteen pictures devoted to Chevy Chase in the spandrels. He produced a similar series, illustrating The King's Quair, on the walls of a new staircase at Penkill Castle, near Girvan. Here he died, November 22, 1890. He began early to write poetry, and published Hades, an Ode (1838); The Year of the World (1846); and the more important Poems of a Painter (1854). Later volumes were the carefully selected and revised Poems (1875), and the genial and delightful little volume of a hundred short pieces, A Poet's Harvest Home (1882). To the literature of art he contributed a Memoir of David Scott (1850), Half-hour Lectures on Art (1861), Albert Dürer (1869), and The Little Masters (1879) in the 'Great Artists' series. See the Autobiography edited by Professor Minto (1892).