173. Georges Bertin Scott, View of a Lake

ArtistGeorges Bertin Scott, French, Paris 1873–Paris 1942
Title, DateView of a Lake, not dated
MediumWatercolor with gouache
Dimensions12 × 19 in. (30.5 × 48.3 cm)
Inscriptions + MarksLower right: Georges Scott
Provenance[Galerie de Bayser, Paris, until 2011; to Weisberg]; Yvonne and Gabriel Weisberg, Minneapolis
Credit LinePromised gift of Gabriel P. and Yvonne M.L. Weisberg, Minneapolis

Georges Scott was a prolific artist renowned for his military subjects. His oil paintings and watercolors sometimes glorified war, but they also showed its brutality. Some of his images were based on war reports, although he was an eyewitness to combat as well. Scott spent years in war zones observing and depicting corpses, devastation, shellings (fig. 1), and the desolate expanse of entrenched battlefields. Since they were often commissioned by the military, many of his paintings reside today in the Musée de l’Armée in Paris.

Expand Figure 1 Georges Bertin Scott, Effect of a Shell in the Night, April 1915 (Effet d’un obus dans la nuit, avril 1915), ink and gouache, 67 x 101 cm, Musée de l’Armée, Paris.

When not on the battlefield, Scott apparently sought out peaceful natural settings where he could make watercolors and perhaps hold thoughts of war at bay. The site of this watercolor is difficult to pinpoint, but it may be Lake Annecy, a large, scenic mountain lake in the area of Haute-Savoie in southeastern France, near Switzerland.

GPW