Alice Boyd of Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, met the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Bell Scott in 1859, and became his pupil and mistress. In 1863 Scott, who had been headmaster of the Government School of Design at Newcastle, moved to London, and a pattern was established whereby Miss Boyd would stay with him and his wife in London during the Winter, and they would pass the summer and autumn months with her at Penkill. Here on the staircase Scott painted murals illustrating James I of Scotland's poem The King's Chair, in the late 1860s his friends Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti paid visits. In 1885 he suffered the first of a series of heart attacks and retired completely to Penkill, where Miss Boyd nursed him until his death five years later.
Scott's appearance in this watercolour may be compared with the portrait by F.B. Barwell, dated October 1877, which was sold in these rooms 2 November 1990, lot 276, and the etched self-portrait of 1879 which appears as the frontispiece to Vol. I of Scott's Autobiographical Notes published posthumously in 1892