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A great woman sculptor?
Kathleen Scott (1878-1947) has been historically typecast as her first husband's courageous widow, and is only secondarily known as a sculptor (Fig. 1). Her close friend, George Bernard Shaw attempted a characteristically intrepid historical reappraisal when, shortly after her death, he told Kathleen's second husband Lord Kennet (formerly Edward Hilton Young):
Now Scott was not wonderful (. . .) he was so unsuited to the job he insisted on undertaking that he ended as the most incompetent failure in the history of exploration. He had a craze for Antarctic Polar exploration without a talent for it. Kathleen on the other hand was a wonderful woman, first rate at her job (. . .) And always successful. Scott's best right to celebrity is that he induced her to marry him. This is what you have to face as her biographer (Shaw 1948).
Fig. 1.
Kathleen Scott in her studio-gallery, 1933 (Photo: Stuart Hamilton; Kennet 1949: opposite 296).
[Figure Omitted; See PDF]
Shaw's opinions on Scott would be controversially elaborated, some thirty years later, by Roland Huntford (Huntford 1979). But Kathleen Scott's commensurate significance as a sculptor remains underexplored. This is despite her posthumously published memoirs and diary, Self-portrait of an artist (1949), which Kennet was editing at the time of Shaw's letter, and more recently Louisa Young's biography A great task of happiness: the life of Kathleen Scott (1995). Yet she was hailed in 1934 by the Hull Daily Mail as 'one of the greatest woman sculptors of her time' (The Daily Mail (Hull) 14 May 1934: 5), and was later stated to be 'the most significant British woman sculptor of [the twentieth] century before Barbara Hepworth' (Stocker 1999: 54). Kathleen was highly prolific, producing some 220 recorded works which fall into two major, quite distinctive categories. Her portrait sculptures, comprising statues, busts and 'heads of men whose features suggest high power or intellect' (The Weekly Dispatch (London) 3 April 1927: 8), for example Shaw himself, account for the large majority of her output. These include monumental portrait statues of Scott, Captain John Smith of Titanic fame in Lichfield (1914) (Savours 2010: 178-179) and Edward Wilson in Cheltenham (1914). Less familiar are her dozen major ideal or imaginative sculptures...