Julian Scott

Julian Scott was born in Johnson, Vermont, in 1846. Sources disagree on the exact day, February 14 per Wikipedia and February 15 per his 1901 New York Times obituary, but agree on the month and year. He received his early education at Lamoille Academy in Johnson before enlisting in the Union Army at age fifteen as a drummer in Company E of the 3rd Vermont Infantry.

On April 16, 1862, at the Battle of Lee's Mills in Virginia, Scott repeatedly crossed a creek under fire to help bring wounded soldiers to safety. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for the action, with the decoration issued in February 1865, making him one of the youngest recipients in the medal's history.

After the war, Scott studied at the National Academy of Design in New York and privately under the painter Emanuel Leutze, then, according to some sources, traveled to Paris to continue his training. His debut submission to the Academy's 1870 spring exhibition led to his election as an associate member, generally dated to 1871. He built a career on large Civil War battle paintings, including commissions for the Vermont State House in Montpelier and a major work gifted to the Seventh Regiment of New York by Elliott F. Shepard.

In 1890, the federal government appointed Scott a special commissioner to document Native American tribes in Arizona and New Mexico in connection with the 1890 census, and he produced a report illustrated with drawings of his own. He settled in Plainfield, New Jersey, where he lived for the rest of his life and died on July 4, 1901. His death was reported the next day by the New York Times under the headline "Col. Julian Scott Dead."

No exact, attributable critic quotation from a major outlet could be verified for Scott, so none is reproduced here. What is well documented is an institutional consensus that treats him as a significant documentary artist of two subjects, the Civil War he lived through as a boy soldier and the Native American communities he was later commissioned to record. The first full length biographical study, Julian Scott: Artist of the Civil War and Native America, frames both bodies of work as valued for their firsthand authenticity and attention to detail rather than for stylistic innovation. His paintings entered major public collections during his lifetime, including state and regimental commissions, which points to contemporaneous recognition of his documentary authority.

Scott's auction market is small and infrequent compared with his museum standing. The highest price located for his work is USD 84,000 for a painting titled Union Vanguard, reported by a price aggregator as an auction result from November 2006; the auction house, city, and exact sale date were not specified in the source and could not be independently confirmed. Heritage Auctions has also listed The Road March, also known as The March Home, though a confirmed sale price and date could not be verified in available sources. A third work, A Friendly Game, painted in 1894, sold at Christie's New York for USD 16,250. Taken together, the confirmed results describe a market in the mid five figures for typical works, with the higher, less well documented Union Vanguard figure treated here with caution.

Scott has no catalogue raisonne, and current gallery or estate representation could not be confirmed as of this writing, so provenance research and museum or established dealer scholarship carry more weight than they would for an artist with an active market infrastructure. His only firmly documented recent sale price is USD 16,250 for A Friendly Game at Christie's; the reported USD 84,000 result for Union Vanguard and any sale price for The Road March should be treated as unconfirmed pending verification of auction house and date. Because so much of his strongest work already sits in institutional collections such as the Smithsonian and Crystal Bridges, the works that do reach the market tend to be secondary in scale or subject to his major public commissions.