The forgotten genius of William Stott of Oldham

There is a curious circumstance about the painter William Stott of Oldham that catches the imagination. It concerns his death, which happened at sea. Stott died suddenly on a ferry crossing, and although the details are scant, it holds up well as an allegory for his life. Torn between the French avant-garde and the British establishment, the artist spent his career traversing two worlds, never finding solid ground in either.

It is perhaps for this reason that the painter, much celebrated on the Continent in his lifetime, has been largely forgotten since his untimely death in 1900. For a brief moment, as one of a group of intrepid artists, he transformed modern art in Victorian Britain. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was their pursuit, grounded in a belief, promoted by James McNeill Whistler, that great art should convey the atmosphere of things.

Stott’s landscapes and portraits capture precisely this quality: they are dreamy, delicate and subtle. A melancholy charm pervades the work. His best paintings are hypersensitive in texture. In Paris, he was championed for this en plein air directness; in London, he was criticised for its formlessness. Like Whistler, he could have cut his losses and abandoned the stuffy environs of the Royal Academy, but for all his modernity, Stott still wanted the approval of the British establishment. Regrettably, it was to elude him throughout his short career.

Born near Oldham in Lancashire in 1857, Stott was the son of a cotton-mill owner. Thanks to having three older brothers who were already employed in the family business, William’s desire to become an artist was encouraged by his father, who paid for him to study at Oldham School of Art, where he excelled.

At the age of 21, he moved to Paris in search of the vie de bohème. It was a febrile time to be in the city. Impressionism was still causing outrage and attracting the outré celebrities of the day, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and Whistler among them. Summers were spent in Grez-sur-Loing, the international artists’ colony south-east of Paris. It was here that Stott learned of the fin-de-siècle Symbolist movement, interpreting its ideas in landscapes that responded to nature and humanity’s place within it.

By anyone’s standards, Stott’s rise was dazzling. Within three years of arriving in France, he was exhibiting at the Paris Salon. The Scottish critic R.A.M. Stevenson (cousin of Robert Louis) described his ascent as having ‘the rapidity of a comet rushing to the sun’. In some ways, he appears to have been quite chameleon-like, able to adapt to each passing trend and dominate it. Friends recalled him as charismatic, ‘a voluminous talker’ and something of a dandy. However, he also possessed a strong moral code and held to his northern roots, signing his canvases ‘William Stott of Oldham’.

In 1882, he became a hero to his fellow expatriates when he was awarded a medal by the Paris Salon for Le Passeur (The Ferryman), a painting made during his time at Grez the previous year (and now in the Tate Collection).

Following his success in France, the artist’s return to London should have been a triumph, yet the English art establishment was rooted in xenophobic mistrust of French influence. Increasing anxiety over homegrown artists decamping to Paris had caused a backlash, and Stott’s paintings were described as having ‘the trail of the serpent’ all over them — the serpent being the French avant-garde.

There was another black mark against him: his friendship with the Wildean Whistler, who had gained notoriety as a champion of modern art following a very public spat with John Ruskin. That an American had dared to take on the British establishment infuriated the Royal Academy, and Stott, who had briefly been a disciple of ‘the master’, was tainted by association.

The two artists later fell out over Whistler’s mistress, Maud Franklin, who had, unbeknown to Whistler, posed nude for Stott’s painting Venus Born of the Sea Foam (1887). After a furious altercation at London’s Hogarth Club, Whistler recorded the incident in letters to Degas and the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens: ‘I gave [Stott] a couple of splendid slaps in the face and an elegant kick in the rear… You must tell the story on the boulevards.’ In fact, the chivalrous Stott had been defending poor Maud, who had been ignominiously thrown over by Whistler for the younger Beatrice Godwin. The two artists never recovered their friendship, and their estrangement is generally thought to have been marked by Stott’s move towards a more realistic style.

Over the following decade, Stott divided his time between France, England and Belgium, exhibiting with the Symbolist group Les XX and submitting work to the Salon. He kept a studio in Paris, off the Rue de Vaugirard, and a house in north London. However, his spiritual home was at Ravenglass on the Cumbrian coast, and it is here that some of his most evocative paintings are set.

Offered in the Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture on 1 July 2026 are seven works from the 1880s. Three are landscapes of the windswept beaches of Stott’s beloved Cumbria, painted with an economy of expression so understated that at times it approaches abstraction. Like Monet, Stott was fascinated by the changing light and shifting sands, and his paintings capture these transitions.

Also offered for sale is Beatrice, a portrait of Stott’s second cousin standing in a doorway as if waiting for a photographer to take her picture. The colours echo the tonal harmonies championed by Whistler, while the slightly off-kilter composition recalls Degas and his radical experimentation with perspective and cropping.

Stott was by nature a restless individual who could never settle anywhere for long. He spent much of 1888 in Switzerland, on a Ruskinian exploration of the Alps, and in early 1900 travelled to Ireland. He became ill on the voyage between Southampton and Belfast, and died.

On his death, as in life, he divided critics. He was celebrated and criticised for being original and ingenious. Obituaries described him as ‘eccentric’. However, his friend and fellow artist Walter Sickert, who had considered him one of the greatest living painters, wrote that Stott ‘never had justice done to him’.

The Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture is on view until 30 June 2026 at Christie’s in London

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