Lot 123: David Paton (Scottish, active 1660-1695) Sir William Scott (c.1670–1725), wearing cloak, lace cravat and long curling wig

Sir William Scott (c.1670–1725), wearing cloak, lace cravat and long curling wig.
Indian ink on vellum, turned and ebonised wood frame, the reverse inscribed with the sitter's details.
Oval, 98mm (3 7/8in) high
Provenance: Christie's London, 19 March 1986, lot 292A
Christie's, South Kensington, 29 March 2009, lot 63

Sir William Scott, was the son of Sir Francis Scott, 1st Bt (1645–1712) and Henrietta Ker (d.1741). On the 15th December 1699 he married Elizabeth, the only surviving child of Margaret, Baroness Napier, and John Brisbane; they had three daughters and a son, Francis, who became 3rd Lord Napier. Elizabeth died in 1705, and Scott married Jean, daughter of Sir John Nisbet of Dirleton, and widow of Sir William Scott of Harden, on the 30th June 1710.

A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Scott was admitted into the Faculty of Advocates in early 1702. That same year, Scott published a brief legal prose work, 'Disputatio Juridica', dedicated to the Buccleuch branch of the Scott family, but it was as a neo-Latin poet that he secured a minor literary reputation. A moderately substantial collection of poems appeared in a volume of Archibald Pitcairne's 'Selecta Poemata', published in Edinburgh in 1727, to which Thomas Kincaid also contributed.

Scott's literary canon may also be extended by inclusion of the song lyric which periodically has been attributed to him, 'The Blithesome Bridal'. Authorship of this text, is shared with the Scottish writer Francis Sempill of Beltrees. The attribution to Scott is based on a commonly attested family tradition. The poem's most recent editor, MacLaine, decides in favour of its being an anonymous composition with neither the Sempill nor Scott attribution secure.