Sholto Johnstone Douglas

"[5] As a portrait painter, Douglas belonged to the period of John Singer Sargent and "...led a long life notable for its unassuming expression of civilized values".

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 1904, London's Temple Bar magazine reported We cannot leave the exhibition without noting the astonishingly successful treatment of light in the speaking portrait of Madame Besnard, full of fine drawing, ease, and originality, which M. Besnard has given us, nor the poetically suggestive beauty of The Sisters by Sholto Douglas, in which a reminiscence of one of Whistler's lovely Nocturnes is aroused.

His work, however, is somewhat lacking in that straightforward, if often undistinguished, grasp of character which gives much old-fashioned art an interest of its own, and frequently it fails to reach the conventional distinction possessed by much modern portraiture.

Still, this combination of qualities makes his portraiture acceptable to those who care for neither of these elements alone, and, a scion of a Dumfriesshire county family, he has painted many people of social standing.

[12] However, Caw says elsewhere in the same book "The portraits of Harrington Mann and Fiddes Watt, of Sholto Douglas and E. A. Borthwick, and of a few others, are more on lines which have become a convention with the younger school.

"[13] In 1909, The International Studio said of a painting "Mr. Sholto Douglas experimented perhaps beyond his powers, but in A Day in June he secured a lively and expressive rendering of the faces; just the qualities which Mr. David Neave missed, for his success with accessories seems to beguile his brush away from the sitters.

[1][16] In December 1921, the novelist Arnold Bennett noted in his journal that on Boxing Day he had lunched with Douglas and his wife at the Hotel Bristol in Cannes to meet the Polish singer Jean de Reszke.