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Robert Sholto Johnstone Douglas (3 December 1871 – 10 March 1958), known
as Sholto Douglas, or more formally as Sholto Johnstone Douglas, was a
Scottish figurative artist, a painter chiefly of portraits and
landscapes.
He was born in Edinburgh, a member of the Queensberry family, part of
the Clan Douglas. He was the son of A. H. Johnstone Douglas DL JP of
Lockerbie (1846–1923) and his wife Jane Maitland Stewart, and the
grandson of Robert Johnstone Douglas of Lockerbie, himself the son of
Henry Alexander Douglas, a brother of the sixth and seventh Marquesses
of Queensberry. His paternal grandmother, Lady Jane Douglas (1811–1881),
was herself a daughter of Charles Douglas, 6th Marquess of Queensberry,
so she was her husband's first cousin. Douglas's third cousin and
contemporary John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry (1844–1900) was
famous for the rules of the sport of boxing. Another cousin was Lady
Florence Dixie, the war correspondent and big game hunter.
Douglas studied art in London, at the Slade School of Fine Art and also
in Paris and Antwerp.
Douglas's cousin Lord Alfred Douglas, or 'Bosie',
was a close friend of the writer Oscar Wilde. When Wilde sued Bosie's
father for libel when accused of "posing as a somdomite" (sic), this led
to Wilde's downfall and imprisonment. In 1895, when during his trial
Wilde was released on bail, Sholto Johnstone Douglas stood surety for
£500 of the bail money.
In his Noel Coward: A Biography (1996),
Philip Hoare writes of "...late nineteenth-century enthusiasts of
boy-love; writers, artists and Catholic converts inclined to
intellectual paedophilia, among them Wilde, Frederick Rolfe, Sholto
Douglas and Lord Alfred Douglas."
He was at home in Scotland as a painter and as a sportsman, shooting,
riding and sailing. He kept ponies brought back from a visit to Iceland.
He came to attention at the Royal Academy by being the first artist to
hang a painting there of a motor car, but was best known for his
portraits and his Scottish landscapes, which "...portrayed, with a truly
poetic sense of atmosphere, the subtle half-tones of his native
countryside".
In 1897, Douglas visited Australia and New Zealand.
His uncle John Douglas, a former Premier of Queensland and Governor of
New Guinea, arranged for the author R. W. Semon to take Douglas with him
on a visit to New Guinea. Semon wrote "This young Scotsman was just then
staying with his uncle on Thursday Island, being on his way back to
Europe after a voyage to Australia and New Zealand."
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