Painter and draughtsman, notably of portraits, eldest son of a Scottish laird, Arthur Henry Johnstone Douglas, of Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire. This large, talented family had wide sporting and artistic interests and Sholto was encouraged to study painting in Dresden, Germany. There he contracted pleurisy and recovered by sailing around the world in the three-masted schooner Macquarie. Returned to Paris, Douglas attended Académie Julian, teachers including William Bouguereau; moved to Antwerp, taught by Jean Guillaume Rosier; then joined the Slade School of Fine Art for tuition during 1895 under Henry Tonks, Fred Brown and Philip Wilson Steer, who was a particular influence. Prior to World War I Douglas acquired a strong reputation as a portrait painter, his eight auburn-haired sisters and the Scottish gentry and aristocracy proving ready models.
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He exhibited at NEAC, RP and RA, from 1905–20, where his huge figure studies in the manner of John Singer Sargent received much attention, and with Scott and Fowles, New York, in America. Had a successful solo show at the Alpine Club Gallery, 1907. During World War I he joined the Royal Naval Reserve and, as an Official War Artist, painted the fleet for the Imperial War Museum. SS Cedric, White Star Liner, lying in the Mersey, is a fine and atmospheric example of Douglas’s work there. After resuming portrait painting in London, in 1926 he settled at Vallescure, near St Raphael on the French Riviera, where he turned to landscapes. Douglas had to vacate a studio full of pictures on the outbreak of World War II, escaping on a coal boat and American troop carrier. After living in London during the Blitz and several moves around Scotland and England, he settled in Beccles, Suffolk. A stroke hampered his sight, resulting in a series of blurred, Monet-like canvases. Latterly, Katharine House Gallery, Marlborough, sold Douglas’s work.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
