Miss Maidie and Miss Elsie Scott

Eric Robertson was a significant figure in the artistic milieu of Edinburgh in the years immediately preceding and following the First World War. Born in Dumfries and trained at the Royal Institution, Robertson was hailed as ‘one of the most brilliant students of his period’. He was strongly influenced by the symbolist work of John Duncan, and it was through Duncan that he met his future wife, the artist Cecile Walton. They exhibited in the ‘Edinburgh Group’ exhibitions of 1912 and 1913. Robertson was a Quaker and so would not take up arms, but he served with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in France during the war.

The Scott sisters belonged to the group of artists and intellectuals in Edinburgh that included Robertson and Walton. Maidie Scott, who was married to the musician, Leonard Gray, became a companion of Wilfred Owen during his time in Edinburgh as a patient receiving treatment for shell-shock at Craiglockhart. Through her account of their friendship, much is known about the poet’s last months before his return to the Front and death in November 1918.

The painting embodies a strong sense of the mood of the time. In particular, it expresses the role of the majority of women during the war – mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, sweethearts and friends – whose fate was to remain at home stoically and anxiously waiting for news. The women in this sombre painting could be tragic muses in modern dress.

Credit: Purchased 2016