Scottie Wilson is considered to be one of the leading proponents of ‘outsider art’, and what one of his great admirers Jean Dubuffet termed ‘art brut’.
Scottie Wilson was born Louis Freeman on 13 May 1878 in Glasgow, Scotland, to Lithuanian immigrants Julius and Esther Freeman. He was one of 12 children and grew up in poverty, dropping out of school aged eight to help the family financially by, amongst other things, selling newspapers on the street.
In 1906, he joined the British army, enlisting with the Scottish Rifles and serving in India, where he contracted Malaria, South Africa and the Sudan. He discharged himself in 1910, but re-enlisted in 1916 to fight on the Western Front, serving with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. In February 1918, he went on a fortnight’s leave but never returned and was recorded as a deserter. Likely due to the army searching for him, he left for Canada, arriving in Nova Scotia in June 1920.
Though he did return to England for a period, he moved again to Canada in 1932, working as a junk dealer in a shop on Yonge Street, Toronto.
It was here that he began going by the name Robert Wilson, and was given the nickname ‘Scottie’. It was at his junk shop, aged 44, that Wilson’s career as an artist began. Picking up a pen that he had collected for resale, he began doodling on the cardboard tabletop, creating faces, designs and patterns over the next couple of days that he would come to call ‘evils and greedies’. He began drawing prolifically, and his work soon came to the attention of Douglas Duncan, a Canadian art collector and patron who in 1936 was influential in starting the Picture Loan Society in Toronto. The Society was established to assist lesser-known artists in exhibiting their work, and allow members to rent or purchase pictures. With Duncan’s help, Scottie Wilson’s artwork began to be exhibited and sold across Canada, with a first solo exhibition held in 1943 in Toronto.
In 1945, he returned to England and quickly became a well-known figure in London’s post-war art scene. He held a solo exhibition at the Arcade Gallery in London, shown alongside an exhibition of works by 20th century artists including Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Joan Miró. Whilst he continued to exhibit at London galleries, he remained mistrustful of dealers and continued to sell artwork himself at a fraction of the price of the galleries, often on the street.
Scottie Wilson lived alone in small lodgings in Kilburn, northwest London and did not marry. In the early 1950s, he was encouraged to travel to France by the artist Jean Dubuffet. Whilst there, Wilson also met Pablo Picasso, who along with Dubuffet admired Wilson’s work and owned a number of pieces. In the 1960s, Scottie Wilson began to create paintings on plates, and was commissioned by Royal Worcester to design a series of dinnerware, which was produced until 1965. He continued to work up until his death from cancer on 26 March 1972.
His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Tate Britain, Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
