Edward Stott

William Edward Stott was an English painter of the late Victorian to early twentieth century period. He trained in Paris under Carolus Duran and was strongly influenced by the Rustic Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage and the work of the Impressionists, which he married with the English landscape tradition of John Linnell and Samuel Palmer. In the mid-1880s he settled in rural Sussex where he was the central figure in an artistic colony. His forte was painting scenes of domestic and working rural life and the surrounding landscapes often depicted in fading light. Stott's work achieved critical and commercial success at home and in Europe in his lifetime but his style of painting became unfashionable in the aftermath of the Great War and much of his work is now neglected and unconsidered.

Early life

Stott was born in Wardleworth, now a contiguous part of Rochdale in Lancashire to Samuel and Jane Stott. His father was a prosperous businessman and owner of a cotton mill in Rochdale who served the town as Mayor from 1863 to 1864 and again during 1865–1866 under a Liberal banner. These were painful years for the cotton industry in Lancashire as the effects of overproduction in the late fifties were exacerbated in 1861 by a major interruption in the cotton supply caused by the start of the American Civil War. The result was unemployment and famine in the mill towns of Lancashire and a period of deprivation known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine.
Whilst Stott Snr must have been impacted financially and it is known he diversified into the owning of coal mines, he was nevertheless able to provide a young Edward Stott with a private education, first at Rochdale Grammar School and latterly at King's Ely where he boarded. He appears to have been studious and artistic but also diffident, sensitive and melancholic judging from an early self-portrait. It became apparent that he would be unsuited to taking over the family business, despite the obvious wish of his strong-minded father and after five years working at various jobs in his father's Manchester office whilst simultaneously attending art classes part-time at the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, Stott opted on a change of career.
In 1880 Stott determined to become a full-time artist and with the support of an unknown benefactor he moved to Paris and to the atelier of Charles August Carolus- Duran. This was a well-trodden path used by some British and Irish art students of the period. It was often seen as a staging post into the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts at which Stott studied under Alexandre Cabanel. Although Cabanel generally painted classical and religious subjects in an academic style, which were dismissed derisively as L'art pompier by some critics, he was a portrait painter of skill with a deep knowledge of French art of the nineteenth century. Stott was thus exposed to influences such as Realism as typified by Jules Bastien Lepage, the impressionists, and the earlier influences of the Barbizon School and in particular Corot and Millet, from whom Stott incorporates some of the prominent features in the use of colour, softness of form and in tonal qualities.
During his period of training in Paris, Stott exhibited four paintings at Paris Salon: The Helping Hand of a Small Friend, and Solitude exhibited in 1883 whilst The High Grasses and The Return to the Poultry House were shown the following year. What became evident at an early stage in Stott's development was his preference for rural themes and a penchant for the domestic depiction of rural life and of children. The use of green in differing tonal shades is predominant in The Helping Hand of a Small Friend and reminiscent of the atelier of Carolus Duran whilst The High Grasses possesses a softer, more tonal application. In terms of subject matter there is a strong influence of the naturalism of Bastien-Lepage.
A necessary component of an art student in Paris' experience was to spend time in une colonie artistique away from the city in a setting where ideas were discussed and alliances were made. Edward Stott opted for Auvers-sur-Oise, northeast of Paris, a rural habitué visited in the past by many artists from Corot to Van Gogh who is buried in the Auvers-sur-Oise municipal cemetery.

Return to England

On Stott's return to England he became something of a peripatetic traveller as he searched for an appropriate rural environment from where he could sketch and paint. Stott was enthralled by a notion that many late Victorians felt, that the true values of Merrie England were to be found in bucolic rural idylls. The reality was that the rural economy was in a parlous state in the latter part of the nineteenth century and was irrevocably changing with many thousands of poorly paid agricultural workers leaving the land for the towns and cities. As their exodus gathered pace many rural trades and skills were also disappearing for good. The viewer of Stott's paintings gets little notion of the reality of life in the English countryside that for many rural Britons remained hard and toilsome.
Initially Stott visited a Paris contemporary, Philip Wilson Steer in Walberswick, Suffolk. Steer and Stott were advocates of En plein air painting, essentially a method of painting outdoors, generally credited to Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, that he expounded in a treatise entitled Reflections and Advice to a Student on Painting, Particularly on Landscape developing the concept of 'landscape portraiture' by which the artist paints directly onto canvas in situ within the landscape, a method that enabled a skilled artist to capture the changing details and light. It was an influential theory whose baton was taken up by later generations of French artists including the Barbizon School where its application by artists that included: Charles-François Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet allowed for a more accurate depiction of outdoor settings in various light and weather conditions. Stott was always drawn to painting the countryside at differing times of the day where he could respond to the changing light and the tonal changes of colour.
Whilst at Walberswick, Stott made a lasting relationship with an Irish painter Walter Osborne with whom he shared his passion for the rural landscape. Stott's work at this time included a number of pastel sketches including Sheep in a Suffolk Landscape an early example of a subject matter that Stott would often revisit. Stott also sent three pictures to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, a newly founded association. In 1884 he sent Amateurs, Complete Angler and The Harvest Moon . Amateurs for which sketches survive wrought the ire of one critic who described it as "French," a work as "failing to put in any values, and entirely refusing to recognise the existence of any interest save the interest of paint." It was a harsh criticism that upset the sensitive Stott but it confirms that the impressionistic representation of art remained controversial and radical to many art critics of the period. In general there was a lack of a positive response to the young French-trained artists, judging by a selection of critical notices that they garnered amongst the art establishment of the time. The same antagonism that had been pointed at Bastien-Lepage, Clausen and, La Thangue in the early 1880s was still prevalent for their acolytes.

New English Art Club

The response to the criticism was the formation of New English Art Club in 1885 by an impressive array of around fifty young British artists that included Edward Stott. Its founding premise was to allow the founding artists to exhibit their own works and to exclude those that were deemed not to their taste. The association held an Annual Exhibition in 1886, a riposte to the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts that was passively rejecting works by younger artists. Amongst the founding members who exhibited were future stalwarts of the establishment including: Stanhope Forbes, Elisabeth Forbes, Henry Tuke, George Clausen, Steer and Osborne and in 1888 they were joined by Walter Sickert. Stott exhibited two rural scenes at the 1887 New English Art Club exhibition including The Ferry Boat a painting set in Winchelsea, East Sussex and described by Stott's biographer Valerie Webb as an "early consummate work." Stott showed at least twenty works at the New English Art Club between 1888 and 1895, the majority of which are missing. A major work by Stott, On a Summer’s Evening, represents his continuing fascination with the tonal differences of light and shade. The NEAC still exists but within a few years of its founding its Avant-garde mission had given way to more conservative tendencies akin to that of the Royal Academy.
In 1886 Stott placed a picture at the Grosvenor Gallery Summer Exhibition. The Grosvenor, which had been founded in 1877, was a gallery and not an academy and thus prepared to offer young artists wall space including Edward Stott's portrait of a young child entitled Mollie which received commendations from The Illustrated London News in 1886. He also exhibited: Feeding the Ducks and Winter’s Night, Sussex Village the former illustrative of Stott's debt to the work of Bastien-Lapage.
In 1888 the New Gallery opened in Regent Street, London. It followed a disagreement amongst the directors of the Grosvenor Gallery and the gallery's owner Sir Coutts Lindsay, which resulted in two directors, the drama and art critic J. Comyns Carr and the painter and gallery administrator C.E. Hallé leaving to open a new gallery and taking with them established artists that included Alma-Tadema, George Frederic Watts and the Royal Academy President Frederic Leighton. It proved a fatal intervention for the Grosvenor which closed in 1890 but a boon for younger artists such as Edward Stott, now aged thirty-three as the founding mission included an offer of exhibition space to experimental and progressive artists. The New Gallery held its inaugural summer exhibition in 1886 followed in October by the first exhibition of industrial and applied arts by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society under the direction of its founding president, Walter Crane.
Stott was joined at the New Gallery by familiar faces: La Thangue, Osborne, Steer, and Alfred East were amongst those artists who had exhibited at the New English Club. Stott chose a familiar rural scene for the Summer Exhibition with a painting entitled Trees Old and Young, Sprouting a Shady Boon for Simple Sheep. The uncomely title harked back to the romantic poet John Keats and his poem of shepherd-hunter Endymion published in 1818 and represented a brief period in Stott's career where poetry and art were intertwined. Idyllic rural settings were by now established themes and Stott chose In an Orchard – An Early Summer Morning and Changing Pastures for exhibition in subsequent years. The latter is an intimate painting of a young cowgirl leading her herd from one field to the next in the gloaming light at the end of the day. The setting sun was a leitmotif of Stott and many of his paintings are executed in the twilight, leading to one critic to describe him as 'the poet-painter of the twilight' Three paintings exhibited at the New Gallery: The Horse Pond, Noonday and The Golden Moon are more experimental in their use of colour lacking non-essential detail. The figure of the boy astride the horse in the former is impressionistic, his features deliberately simplified. There is a timeless, unchanging quality to these paintings where atmosphere and nostalgia predominate at the expense of realism.