William Bell Scott: A Pre-Raphaelite Romance

In 1867 and 1868, William Bell Scott - an Edinburgh born member of the Pre-Raphaelite social circle - created a folding screen, known as 'The King's Quair', for the Newcastle industrialist James Leathart. Bold in colour and rich in detail, it illustrates 'The King's Quair', a fifteenth-century poem attributed to King James I of Scotland that narrates his courtship of his future queen, Lady Joan Beaufort. It also reproduces - on a much smaller scale - scenes that Scott painted in a mural at Penkill Castle in Ayrshire, south-west Scotland, for Alice Boyd, a fellow artist with whom he had a long and loving relationship.

The screen was sold after Leathart's death and exhibited only once during the twentieth century. But it has recently been the focus of a major conservation project and is now a highlight of the Scottish collection of the National Galleries of Scotland. In this lecture…