Lucy Emily Baxter (21 January 1837 – 10 November 1902) was an English writer on art, chiefly under the pseudonym ofLeader Scott.
She was born atDorchester, the third daughter ofWilliam Barnes, theDorsetshire poet, by his wife Julia Miles. She began writing at eighteen, and from the small profits of stories and magazine articles saved enough to visitItaly, a cherished ambition. There she met and in 1867 married Samuel Thomas Baxter (1810–1903), a member of a family long settled inFlorence, which then became her home. For thirty-five years she was a well-known figure in the literary and artistic life of the city, and in 1882 was elected an honorary member of theAccademia delle Belle Arti. For thirteen years her residence was theVilla Bianca, outside Florence, in the direction ofVincigliata (nearFiesole) andSettignano. Among those with whom she was associated in literary research wasJohn Temple Leader, a wealthy English resident at Florence, who owned thecastle of Vincigliata. Her literary pseudonym of ‘Leader Scott’ combined the maiden surnames of her two grandmothers, Isabel Leader being her mother’s mother and Grace Scott the mother of her father.
Her principal publication wasThe Cathedral Builders (1899 and 1900), an important examination of the whole field ofRomanesque architecture in relation to theComacine masons. Her biographer for theDNB observed that:
though necessarily based onMerzario’sI Maestri Comacini, the book shows much original observation and research and, if its arguments are not always conclusive, the international scope of the work and its wealth of illustration render it a storehouse of information and a useful introduction to an unfrequented field of speculation. The intention of the work was to attribute the entire genesis of mediaeval architecture tomasonicguilds derived, so it is supposed, from theRoman Collegia.[1]
Apart from this work and numerous magazine articles, she published:
She translated from Italian:
Baxter died at the Villa Bianca near Florence on 10 November 1902.
