Formal rooms for dining were introduced during the nineteenth century and represented a family’s taste and attainment. So-called dining room pictures, still life paintings of overflowing fruit and flowers, became popular as symbols of plenty and material comfort. Lorenzo Scott’s The Dining Room Lady relies on that history of association for the qualities of refinement that he wishes to bestow upon the figure of this beautiful woman with golden eyes. He uses his conversance with early Western European art traditions to evoke queenly attributes: the neck ruff, jeweled headband, and gold-encrusted gown. His knowledge of Elizabethan, Renaissance, and Baroque art was not gleaned through formal university study but rather his own keen observations of art hanging in museums and pictured in books, and experimentation with available materials to learn to layer and glaze. Scott was born in West Point, Georgia. His family, devout Southern Baptists, moved to Atlanta when he was an infant. During the 1960s, he had the opportunity to live and work in New York City, where he frequently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and also enjoyed the work of sidewalk artists in Greenwich Village. When he returned to Atlanta around 1970, he supported himself as a construction worker and house painter, but he also began to paint, incorporating the religious and historical themes and visual and technical approaches that he so admired.

Stacy C. Hollander, “Lorenzo Scott,” exhibition brochure for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020).