William Walcot (1874-1943)

William Walcot was a British architect, graphic artist and etcher, notable as a practitioner of refined Art Nouveau. William was born at Lustdorf, near Odessa in a mixed Scottish-Russian family.  He grew up in Western Europe and South Africa, returning to Russia at the age of 17, and studied arts and architecture under Leon Benois at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg and later attended art schools in Paris.

William Walcot was the most prominent architectural draughtsman of the 1920s and 30s, developing a somewhat impressionistic style in gouache and watercolour which won commissions from Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Baker and Aston Webb. Walcot was engaged in printmaking, creating reconstructions of ancient Greek, Roman, Babylonian and Egyptian buildings. A folio of his work was published in 1919 as ‘Architectural Watercolours and Etchings of William Walcot. He was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1913 as an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1916 and a Fellow of the RIBA in 1922. He was also an associate of the British School at Rome.