Scottie Wilson

1888-1972 · Glasgow, UK

A Glasgow junk dealer started doodling with a customer’s fountain pen in his Toronto shop and could not stop. Picasso and Dubuffet collected him. He still sold drawings from a suitcase outside his own exhibitions.

The life

Born Louis Freeman to a poor Glasgow Jewish family, Wilson left school at nine, sold newspapers, soldiered through the First World War and ended up running a junk shop in Toronto. There, in his forties, testing a nib, the line took over. He returned to Britain in 1945 and lived frugally while his intricate drawings entered the collections of Picasso, Dubuffet and the Tate. Distrustful of dealers, he priced his own work in shillings on the pavement outside galleries selling it for pounds inside. He died in 1972 with cash stuffed in biscuit tins and cheques he had never bothered to cash.

The work

Meticulous pen and crayon worlds of totemic faces, fountains, birds and fish, staging his lifelong battle between the greedies and the forces of peace. Later, designs for Royal Worcester china, outsider art on dinner plates.

Why we love them

He kept control of his own work in an art world desperate to take it, armed only with a suitcase and Glaswegian scepticism. A patron saint for every artist selling at the market while the gallery marks it up.

Go deeper

• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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