Tuesday 28 August 2018

Dugald Sutherland MacColl (1859-1948), - Scottish poet artist and art critic

Dugald Sutherland MacColl was born in Glasgow on 10th March 1859.  His father was the Reverend Dugald MacColl.

Educated at the University of London before going up to the University of Oxford, Dugald went on to study at the Westminster School of Art and the Slade School under Alphonse Legros.  He became Keeper of the Wallace Collection and of the Tate Gallery. He was an artist, art critic, poet and founder of the National Art Collections Fund. Dugald was friendly with many of the literary figures of the day - W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Lady Gregory, Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells, Charles Ricketts, Augustus John, Auguste Rodin, Roger Fry and Walter Crane.  He was the art critic for "The Spectator" and "The Saturday Review" between 1896 and 1906.

Dugald died on 21st December 1948.


“The Miners’ Response” by D.S. MacColl

We do; the present desperate stage
Of fighting brings us luck
And in the higher war we wage
(For higher wage) We struck.


D.S.MacColl’s First World War poetry collections were:
“Another neutral” (Maclehose, Glasgow, 1915
“Bull, and other war verses” (Constable, 1919)
“A German peace, flyting to Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain” (Maclehose, Glasgow,1916)
“A Merry New Ballad of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States in America” (Maclehose, Glasgow, 1915)
He also had a poem published in the WW1 poetry Anthology “Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914 – 1918” Edited by Brian Gardner, with a Foreword by Edmund Blunden  (Methuen, London 1964)

The portrait of Dugald MacColl was painted by his nephew the artist Donald Graeme MacLaren in 1906.  Donald joined the Army in WW1 and was killed in Belgium in 1917 – see www.fascinatingfactsofww1.blogspot.co.uk


Sources:

Catherine W. Reilly “Engish Poetry of the First World War:  A Bibliography” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1978)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugald_Sutherland_MacColl