The Border Widow by William Bell Scott. 1861. Oil on canvas, 291/2 x 22 inches (74.6 x 56 cm). Collection of Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum, accession no. ABDAG003867.
The background of this painting features Penkill Castle with Alice Boyd as the model for the widow tending to her deceased husband. The setting is at dusk and the subject is taken from a Border Ballad published in Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border of 1802-03. Bell Scott has painted the native foliage in the fore and midground with true Pre-Raphaelite veracity and detail. This work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861, no. 446. In the catalogue it was accompanied by these lines of the ballad “I digg’d a grave and laid him in, And happ’d him with sod sae green.” This work greatly impressed D. G. Rossetti. In a letter of May 25, 1861 to Scott he writes: “Your picture in the Academy has more poetry in it than anything in the whole place. Where did you meet with that intensely lovely background? It is so fine that in your place I should still do something to the figures to give them more fulness of design & certainly more study in costume. The picture is above the line but can be fairly enough seen.”
When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861 it proved controversial. It received a generally favourable review from The Athenaeum:
“In The Border Widow (446) Mr. W. B. Scott has been successful in showing us the attempt of a bereaved widow to bury her husband; but, with a dash of unexpected humour not quite appropriate to the subject, we have the woman interring the departed in two pieces – she is putting his head and trunk into one hole, having left his legs at some distance behind…Seriously to speak, there is so much skilful painting and honest feeling for nature in the background of this picture – a border house, wrapped in flame to the roof, a scanty wood, sparse-leaved and letting the purple clouds of a fiery sunset and masses of gloom look through, - there is even so much feeling in the wretchedly-expressed figure of the woman and her other two halves, that we cannot but lament the painter had no friend at hand to tell him an excellent picture is preposterously marred” (Athenaeum, No. 1752, May 25, 1861, 698).
The critic of The Art Journal was much less kind:
“’The Border Widow,’ W. B. Scott, No. 446, is one of those pictures which make earnest lovers of Art faint and sick of heart through sore disappointment, and which makes hope in the future of artists go up ‘like the crackling of thorns under a pot.’ Mr. Scott once gave evidence of being an artist of more than ordinary power in the higher ranks of history, till he got bitten by that mania which has entombed so many other intellects; and after having gone on from bad to worse, he now appears as the bond-slave of perversion and most hideous ugliness – the victim at once of that perverted style which seems the necessary end of Pre-Raphaelitism, and that revelling in the ugly and horrific from which alone its morbid craving seems able to extract its Art and pleasure-destroying ailment” (Art Journal, 23 (1861); 196)
The Illustrated London News was also not impressed by this painting: “Mr. W. B. Scott, who has published some very sound and clever observations on art, shows how the wildest and most uninformed practice may be combined with the soundest theory, in that weak and miserable ‘Border Wife’ (446) of his…If there were no other ground of complaint against it it would be in the very arrangement, whereby the figure of the dead warrior (a wretched bundle of rags) is placed in the rear of the female figure, the latter turning her back to the spectator. But, in conception, drawing, colour, everything, this is really a terrible affair.” (Illustrated London News, 38, (June 22,1861): 5.
Last modified 6 February 2022