Kathleen Scott

Born at Carlton in Lindrick, Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire, Kathleen Scott was the youngest of the eleven children of the Church of England clergyman Lloyd Stuart Bruce (1829–1886) and his first wife Jane Skene (c. 1828– 1880), an amateur artist.[1] An orphan by the age of eight, Scott was brought up by a relative, William Forbes Skene, in Edinburgh where she attended St George's School before being sent to boarding schools in England including a convent school run by nuns.[1][2]

Scott studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1900 to 1902 and then enrolled at the Académie Colarossi in Paris.[3] Although she had taken some modelling classes at the Slade, at the Académie Colarossi Scott concentrated on sculpture and within three months had a statuette of a mother and child accepted for the Paris Salon, where it won a medal.[1] She was befriended by Auguste Rodin who, although he was not formally taking students at the time, agreed to mentor her and for Scott to visit his studio on a regular basis.[3][1] In Paris, Scott also met Aleister Crowley, Gertrude Stein, the photographer Edward Steichen, Isadora Duncan and, very briefly, Pablo Picasso.[1] Scott and Duncan became friends and in 1903 travelled to Belgium and the Netherlands together.[1]

In December 1903, following the Ilinden uprising Scott joined a relief mission to Macedonia, undertaking logistic duties and some basic nursing work at refugee camps.[2] There, in February 1904, Scott fell ill with a life-threatening bout of influenza and, possably, typhoid.[1] When she recovered she decided to return to Paris and boarded a freightrer for Marseilles but disembarked at Naples and spent some months in Florence before returning to Paris and reopening her studio.[1] Scott spent the summer of 1906 at Noordwijk in the Netherlands supporting a pregnant Isadora Duncan and then spent some months on an island near Methana in Greece before moving to London.[1]

In London, Scott took a flat in Cheyne Walk and made a series of portrait busts, mostly of young men.[1] She became acquainted with George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm and J.M. Barrie, whose former home she later bought. At one point she became seriously ill with an abdominal cyst and was thought unlikely to live.[1] Scott recovered and subsequently assisted her upstairs neighbour, a district maternity nurse, on house calls to deliver babies.[1]

In October 1907 she met Captain Robert Falcon Scott at a tea party having briefly seen him at a lunch hosted by Mabel Beardsley several months earlier.[1] The two spent ten days together before he left London on Naval duties but within a month they had decided to marry.[1] Their wedding was on 2 September 1908, in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace with Rodin among the 150 guests.[1] The couple took a house on Buckingham Palace Road in London and within a year their son Peter Scott, who became famous in painting and conservation, was born.[1]

Kathleen and Robert Falcon Scott aboard the Terra Nova, 1910

In July 1910, she accompanied her husband to New Zealand to see him off on his journey to the South Pole and in October that year they spent a fortnight together at Lyttleton before Captain Scott and his crew departed on 29 November.[1] Kathleen Scott returned to England and, after extended stop-overs in Australia and Egypt, arrived at Dover in February 1911.[1] A biographer of the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen has suggested that, in her husband's absence, she began a brief affair with Nansen.[4] This has been refuted.[5]

In London Kathleen Scott created portrait busts and heads of various friends and relatives and also worked on a statuette of Florence Nightingale while supporting fund-raising exercises for the Antarctic expedition.[1] She received her first commission for a public monument, a life-size statue of Charles Rolls, which was unveiled in April 1912.[1] When Rolls's family lent Scott some of his clothing for her model, she was shocked to find they had included blood-stained items from his fatal air crash.[1] During 1912 she also created portrait busts of, among others, the prime minster Herbert Asquith, Fridtjof Nansen, Compton Mackenzie plus a series of figures of bishops for the chapel at Winchester College and a sculpture of a baby for a hospital.[1] At the end of the year she began working on a statuette of her husband.[1]

Kathleen Scott decided to travel to New Zealand to met her husband on his return from the Antarctica. She left Liverpool on 4 January 1913 for New York, then travelled by train to New Orleans and El Paso and went camping in Mexico before sailing from California to Tahiti.[1] The bodies of Captain Scott and his companions were discovered on the 12 November 1912 and the news reached London on 11 January 1912 with a memorial service, attended by King George V, being held at St Paul's Cathedral on 14 February 1913.[1] Five days later a wireless message finally reached the ship Kathleen Scott was on and she was informed of her husband's death.[1] She continued on to New Zealand where she was given the diaries and letters which had been recovered when her husband's body had been found.[1]

On her return to London Scott, and her son, were the subject of intensive public and press attention which she tried to counter by embarking on a concentrated period of work. She began work on large statues of Captain Scott, Asquith and Edward Smith.[1] In August 1913 she spent some time in Andorra and in 1914 she went to North Africa. After trekking in the Sahara, Scott returned to Britain shortly before World War I began.[1]

Her statue of her first husband in Christchurch, New Zealand (photographed before it was damaged in the 2011 earthquakes)

Scott sculpted a statue of her first husband, Captain Scott, of which there are two versions: a bronze statue erected in Waterloo Place, London, in 1915 and a replica in white marble located in Christchurch, New Zealand, erected in 1917.[1]

During World War I, Scott also worked in a variety of other roles, alongside her sculpture career. Initially she worked in northern France helping to establish a ambulance service. She worked in an electronics factory at Erith before, in 1917, serving as a private secretary to Sir Matthew Nathan in the Ministry of Pensions.[2] In 1918 she worked at the Queen's Hospital in Sidcup, creating facial models of patients for the plastic surgeon Harold Gillies.[6][7]

Following the war, Lady Scott received considerable press coverage for her dignified manner while continuing to work as a sculptor and raise her child.[2] During the inter-war years she had six significant solo exhibitions, regularly showed new works at the Royal Academy in London and was the subject of BBC Television's first programme on sculpture.[2] In France she won a medal at the Salon des Artistes Francais in 1925 and was made an associate member of the Societe des Artistes Francais.[2] In 1922, she married the politician Edward Hilton Young.[3] Her second son, Wayland Hilton Young (1923–2009) was a writer and politician. Her grandchildren include the artist Emily Young and Louisa Young, writer.

From 1915, Scott was a member of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers.[8] In 1928 she became an associate member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1946.[3]

From 1927 Scott lived at Lancaster Gate in central London and died, from leukemia, at the nearby St Mary's Hospital, Paddington in July 1947. Her funeral service was held at West Overton in Wiltshire where her ashes are buried.[2] A memorial exhibition of her work was held at the Mansard Gallery in 1947 and two years later her autobiography, Self Portrait of An Artist was published.[9]

• A small bronze of the Indian actor Sabu which is now missing, after a theft.
• A life-size statue of Thomas Cholmondeley, 4th Baron Delamere. It was initially situated in Nairobi, Kenya, but is now in the Soysambu Conservancy, near Nakuru, Kenya.
• Here Am I, Send Me, a bronze figure of a nude boy raising his arm as if volunteering. Following World War I, Scott made two casts of the figure as war memorials, one for West Downs School and one for Oundle School. West Downs was her son Peter's old school and when the school closed down the memorial was relocated to WWT Slimbridge, the nature reserve he had established.[22][23][24][25]
• A memoral plaque to Captain JMT Richie at the church of St Peter & St Paul at Medmenham in Buckinghamshire.[26]
• Three works by Scott are in the collection of London's National Portrait Gallery, and she is also the subject of several photographic portraits there.[27]