Six things you didn’t know about the Scott Thomas Buckle Collection

Discover six surprising stories behind the Scott Thomas Buckle Collection - from a war poet turned painter to a forgotten Pre-Raphaelite portrait. These hidden histories, revealed for the first time in the Leighton House exhibition Victorian Treasures, highlight Buckle’s passion for rediscovering overlooked Victorian treasures and the remarkable tales they still have to tell.

1. The painter who was also a war poet…

Eva Spurway’s watercolour of The Poisoned Phial is very much a homage to the Pre-Raphaelites, but did you know that she was also a war poet? In 1917 she published a volume of her poems titled Woven Arras, which included titles such as England, A Wounded Australian in Birmingham, and Blind Soldiers. The latter includes these lines:

“They waiting in the Land of Sightless Eyes

With groping hands stretched dumbly through the night,

And faces strained towards the unseen light,

Towards the dawn that never more shall rise,

The newly blind that stumble dreamer-wise,

With wandering step, across the windless height

That men call Loneliness, each proselyte

To Life-in-Death, on us their great trust lies.”

2. The mosaic that was never executed…

Frederick Richard Pickersgill’s sketch for The Industrial Arts in Time of Peace is an early preparatory design for the planned mosaic decoration of a lunette in the South Court at the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A. Pickersgill also produced an oil study of the same subject, for which he was paid £500, and a large cartoon, but due to a shortage of funds, the mosaic was never executed. Frederic Leighton went on to produce a fresco on a similar theme - Industrial Arts as Applied to Peace, which along with his Industrial Arts as Applied to War, remains in situ at the museum to this day.    

3. A forgotten portrait of a Pre-Raphaelite writer…

Catalogued simply as “Portrait of a Man”, Buckle recognised the sitter in John Brett’s 1856 profile portrait of William Michael Rossetti after comparing it with other known portraits of the Victorian writer. The younger brother of Christina and Dante Gabriel, William Michael Rossetti was a founding member and chronicler of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was also the editor of their short-lived magazine The Germ and went on to work successfully as an art critic and biographer. His reviews of Brett’s paintings were favourable and the two men corresponded from the late 1850s. In a letter to his sister Rosa, Brett described W. M. Rossetti as “the best judge I know after JR [John Ruskin].”  

4. The woman with snakes in her hair…

Lisa Stillman was the daughter of the American writer, William Stillman, and stepdaughter to his second wife, the artist and model Marie Spartali Stillman. Sabina, was one of Lisa’s first exhibited pictures, showing at The New Gallery in 1888. An inscription on the back of the frame describes the picture as “Head of the Medusa”, a reference to the snake-haired Gorgon sister from mythology. Sabina’s truncated neck and raised-up hair are suggestive of Medusa’s severed head, whilst upon closer inspection, one can find red-eyed snakes entwined amidst her serpentine hair. This striking image, with its direct gaze, could almost be a self-portrait, except that Lisa had brown eyes.  Another possibility is that the model could be her blue-eyed half-sister, Effie, who went on to become a sculptor.

5. Four artists’ portraits for the price of one…

Edward Matthew Ward’s drawing of A Night with the Wards captures the portraits of four Victorian artists – Henrietta Ward (1832-1924), her father, the engraver George Raphael Ward (1797-1878), her mother, the miniaturist Mary Ward, née Webb (fl. 1823-1849) and Henrietta’s fiancé, Edward Matthew Ward (1816-1879) at the family’s home at 31 Fitzroy Square, London. Although the picture appears to be one of domestic bliss, unbeknownst to Henrietta’s parents, the young couple were already planning their elopement, which took place the following year with the help of the novelist Wilkie Collins. The drawing had previously been housed in an album owned by Henrietta, the majority of its contents drawn for her by Edward in the years before their marriage and his election as a Royal Academician. The drawing was reproduced in Henrietta’s biography Memories of Ninety Years, published in 1924.

6. Two drawings by a child prodigy…

John Everett Millais entered the Royal Academy Schools aged just 11 in 1840 as their youngest ever student. His precocious talent is borne out by two drawings which were apparently drawn from memory at the Epsom Derby when he was only 12 years old.

One shows the beginning of the race, with a crowded grandstand in the background. The second drawing shows a dismounted jockey and his horse after the race. One of the drawings appeared for sale on eBay in 2016, where it was misattributed to the artist’s niece, Judith Lear, who had annotated the drawing beneath the mount. The other drawing appeared at auction in 2024, where it was incorrectly ascribed to “Circle of Henry Alken”. The two drawings are numbered “2” and “4”, suggesting that at least two more drawings were produced by the young Millais to complete the sequence.   

The Leighton House exhibition Victorian Treasures from the Cecil French Bequest and the Scott Thomas Buckle Collection (24 May to 21 September 2025) showcases an eclectic selection of drawings and watercolours from Buckles collection, on public display together for the first time. Buckle first visited Leighton House in 1986, where he saw a display from the Cecil French Bequest. French’s collection became a significant inspiration for Buckle in forming his own collection. The display of both French and Buckle’s collections together at Leighton House as part of Victorian Treasures is therefore an apposite pairing.

Scott Thomas Buckle is an art historian and collector, based in London. He began collecting in the 1980s and has now amassed a large collection of artworks from the 17th to 20th Centuries. Research is central to Buckle’s collecting process. When he began collecting, he would spend any days off work attending lectures, or visiting the Courtauld Institute’s Witt Library where he would research his latest acquisitions. His deep knowledge of the Victorian period, including its lesser-known artists, has enabled him to discover the often-lost history of many of the drawings within his collection.