MacColl, D. S.

MacColl, D. S. ( Dugald Sutherland) (b Glasgow, 10 Mar. 1859; d London, 21 Dec. 1948). British painter, critic, lecturer, and administrator. From 1890 to 1895 he was art critic of the Spectator and from 1896 to 1906 of the Saturday Review (and again from 1921 until 1930, when he moved to the newly founded Week-End Review). In these positions he helped to influence public taste in favour of Impressionism, and his book Nineteenth Century Art (1902) contains one of the earliest balanced assessments of the movement. He did not care for the Post-Impressionists, however, and thought that Cézanne must have suffered from an eye defect. MacColl was keeper of the Tate Gallery, 1906–11, and of the Wallace Collection, 1911–24, one of the founders of the National Art Collections Fund in 1903, and a vigorous controversialist; in the Dictionary of National Biography he is described as ‘highly versatile, volcanically energetic, utterly honest and self-confident’. As a painter he concentrated on landscape watercolours, although he also did portraits in oils, including one of Augustus John (1907, Manchester AG). His books include Confessions of a Keeper (1931) and Philip Wilson Steer (1945).