John Keats and Scottish Artists

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to widen the compass of Keats’s visual legacy and to refocus attention from the painters of Southern England to the book illustrators and designers of Scotland. What follows seeks to recalibrate our understanding of the reception of Keats’s poems in art by addressing hitherto unexplored aspects of the poet’s afterlives. This chapter is divided into two sections, each focusing on a Scottish city where artists engaged with Keats’s poems within a regional context of cultural and commercial rejuvenation. The first section considers the Scottish Pre-Raphaelites, Joseph Noël Paton (1821–1901) and William Bell Scott (1811–90), both of whom had strong connections with Edinburgh and its surrounding areas. The second section focuses on artist-craftworkers, such as Talwin Morris, who self-consciously identified with a particular Scottish city at a specific historical moment, pioneering and popularizing what is now known as the Glasgow Style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.