Early life and education Born on 27 March 1878 at
Carlton in Lindrick,
Nottinghamshire, Kathleen Edith Agnes Bruce was the youngest of the eleven children of the Church of England clergyman Lloyd Stuart Bruce (1829–1886) and his first wife Jane Skene (c. 1828–1880), an amateur artist. An orphan by the age of eight, she was brought up by a relative,
William Forbes Skene, in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she attended
St George's School before being sent to boarding schools in England, including a convent school run by nuns.
Paris and Macedonia Scott studied at the
Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1900 to 1902. Then, with two friends from the Slade, Jessie Gavin and
Eileen Gray, Scott enrolled at the
Académie Colarossi in Paris. Although she had taken some modelling classes at the Slade, at the Académie Colarossi Scott concentrated on sculpture and within three months had a statuette of a mother and child accepted for the
Paris Salon, where it won a medal. This has been denied by others. In London, Kathleen Scott created portrait busts and heads of various friends and relatives and also worked on a statuette of
Florence Nightingale while supporting fund-raising exercises for the Antarctic expedition. Five days later a wireless message finally reached the ship Kathleen Scott was on and she was informed of her husband's death. On her return to London, Scott and her son were the subject of intensive public and press attention which she tried to counter by embarking on a concentrated period of work. The first to be commissioned, by the mayor of
Cheltenham, was her statue of
Edward Wilson which was unveiled in July 1914. Historian
David Day in 2013 suggested that the pair had conducted an affair there; however, this is refuted by historian Tom Griffiths, who says that they were united in grief at the time and found solace in each other. In 1917, Scott served as a private secretary to Sir
Matthew Nathan in the
Ministry of Pensions.
1920s Scott visited Paris immediately after the war ended and worked to promote the formation of the
League of Nations. The Lawrence statue was one of several idealised sculptures of young male nudes that Scott created throughout her career. In November 1919 Scott met
Edward Hilton Young, an
M.P. with a distinguished war record. They married in March 1922 with the ceremony taking place in the
St Mary Undercroft crypt of the
Palace of Westminster. From 1927 Scott and her family lived at Leinster Corner near
Lancaster Gate in central London overlooking
Kensington Gardens, in a house once owned by
J. M. Barrie. The property had a coach-house, which she converted into a two-storey high studio, and a large garden where she worked on monumental pieces in the open air. Scott died, from
leukaemia, at
St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, near to her Lancaster Gate home in July 1947. Her funeral service was held at
West Overton in Wiltshire where a commemorative plaque is sited. Scott's grandchildren include the artist
Emily Young and the writer
Louisa Young, her biographer. ==Awards and memberships==