Scott, David and William Bell
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
These brothers; of whom David is by far the more important, certainly deserve a place in this volume, Born at Edinburgh in 1777, David lived a comparatively uneventful life, his lofty gifts being quite unrecognised by his contemporaries, and his death in 1849 being hastened in some degree by this persistent neglect. Nowadays, however, connoisseurs in Scotland are beginning to appreciate him, perceiving in his output technical merits far transcending those of Raeburn himself; while people who care for art dealing with the supernatural are coming to see, slowly but surely, that Scott's Paracelsus and Vasco de Gama are in the forefront of work of this kind; and that his beautiful drawings for The Ancient Mariner render the very spirit of Coleridge, the arch-mystic, render it with a skill unsurpassed in any previous or subsequent illustrations to the poem. William Bell Scott was also a native of Edinburgh, being born there in 1811, and his career was very different from David's, for he won worldly success from the first, and ere his death in 1890 he had received many laurels. Etching some of his brother's works, and painting a host of pictures, he was also a voluminous writer; and his Autobiography contains some really valuable comments on the mystic symbolism permeating the painting of the middle-ages, and embodies also a shrewd and interesting account of Rossetti's essays in table-turning and kindred practices. Moreover, William Bell's poems are almost all of a metaphysical order; and though it is extravagant to call him "the Scottish Blake," as many people have done, his mystical verse undoubtedly reflects a certain "meditative beauty," as Fiona Macleod once wrote on the subject.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The Occultism volume's 1920 prediction that Scottish connoisseurs would come to rate David Scott's technique "far transcending" Raeburn's has not been borne out: Raeburn remains a fixture of British portraiture while David Scott (1806-1849) is still a specialist's taste, represented chiefly in the Scottish National Gallery. The birth date of 1777 given here is wrong for David, who was born in 1806; 1777 is the birth year of the brothers' father, the Edinburgh engraver Robert Scott. William Bell Scott's reputation has if anything grown, though not as the mystical poet or "Scottish Blake" of this account -- he is now remembered as a Pre-Raphaelite associate and for his Northumbrian history murals at Wallington Hall, above all Iron and Coal, and for the Autobiographical Notes whose candour about Rossetti caused offence when they appeared in 1892. One small irony: the "Fiona Macleod" quoted at the end was the pen name of William Sharp, a fact made public after his death in 1905.
Written for this edition, 2026.