The Life of James scott

     James Scott was born in Racine, Wisconsin in 1889. He pursued his art through great adversity; His father died when he was 12 years old, and he had to drop out of school and work to help support his mother and two younger sisters. (He worked at a hardware store stocking shelves.) Two years later, his mother became ill and died, and James had to continue working to provide for his two younger sisters and keep them all out of a poor house or an orphanage. Despite this early hardship, James stayed true to his passion, his art, and won a scholarship to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. After this, he traveled to Milton NY, on the Hudson River in 1913, and became involved with an art colony founded by a Danish artist who was also from Racine Wisconsin, Anders Anderson. Anderson named the colony Elverhoj, Danish for “hill of the elves.”

     The artists of the colony exhibited their works in a gallery that Anderson operated in nearby Poughkeepsie New York. As Elverhoj became more established, the name was changed to the Hudson Highlands Art Association. Along with his work at the colony, James studied art with John F. Carlson in Woodstock, and at the Art Student League in NYC.

     In 1918, James was called into military service. Many of his sketches and paintings of WWI battle scenes and bombed cities were donated to West Point. After the war, James remained in France, and became an instructor at the college of Applied and Fine Arts at the University of Beaune, France. There he won first prize for a mural to be used as a backdrop for a theatre production in Paris (included in the photographed paintings archived here).

     Upon returning to the States, James resumed his work at his studio in Milton, NY.  He became a member of the Salmagundi Club, exhibited at the Babcock Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of fine art and the National Academy. During the Great Depression, James Scott was commissioned for several WPA art projects.

     During WWII, James continued painting and teaching at his studio in Milton. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library and museum in Hyde Park, the Syracuse University Art Galleries, Vassar College, West Pointe, the Albany Institute and the Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, among others.

     In 1966, Scott and his wife (Kirsten Scott) moved to Denver, Colorado to be closer to their son, James Henry Scott (who was a geophysicist), his wife and their 3 grandchildren. James Scott died there in 1967.