William Bell Scott: Thou Hast Left Me Ever, Jamie

William Bell Scott (1811-1890) was a Scottish artist in oils and watercolour and occasionally printmaking. He was also a poet and art teacher, and his posthumously published reminiscences give a chatty and often vivid picture of life in the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites; he was especially close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. After growing up in Edinburgh, he moved to London, and from 1843 to 1864 was principal of the government School of Art in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he added industrial subjects to his repertoire of landscapes and history painting. He was one of the first British artists to extensively depict the processes of the Industrial Revolution. He returned to London, working for the Science and Art Department until 1885.

He painted a cycle of historical subjects mixed with scenes from modern industry for Wallington Hall in Northumberland, his best known works, and a purely historical cycle for Penkill Castle in Ayrshire in Scotland. He did not paint many portraits, but his striking portrait of his friend Algernon Charles Swinburne is the iconic image of the poet. His etchings were mostly designed to illustrate his books. After 1870 Scott was much in London, where he bought a house at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, and was held in high repute as an artist and an author. 

Robert Burns's 1793 song, Thou Hast Left me Ever, Jamie is the mournful ballad of a forsaken lover. The present drawing was given by Bell Scott to his pupil and mistress Alice Boyd, at whose home, Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, he spent half of each year. Whilst Scott saw himself as a history painter, he also often took literary subjects, particularly Burns, as his inspiration.

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HC-1534: card size 7" x 5" (178mm x 127mm)