Paul Wescott was a painter, engraver, and calligrapher. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where he participated in the annual exhibitions from 1934 to 1968. In 1930, he won a Toppan landscape Prize and a Cresson Traveling Scholarship, the first two of several awards he received from the Pennsylvania Academy. At the National Academy, he won the Obrig Prize (1954), three Palmer Prizes (1956, 1965, and 1967), the Henry Ward Ranger Fund Purchase Prize, the Altman Prize (1959), and an Andrew Carnegie Prize (1969). His paintings are in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; the Wilmington Society of Fine Art, Delaware; and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine.
For twenty years (1932-52) Wescott was director of the art department of the Hill School, Pottstown, Pennsylvania. During the last two decades of his life, he lived at West Chester, Pennsylvania, during which time he served as Vice President of the Chester County Art Association. He spent many summers at his home on Long Island, Friendship, Maine, where he could pursue his interest in marine painting.
Memorial exhibitions of Wescott's work were held at the Chester County Art Association in 1971 and at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1972, and an exhibition of his marine paintings was held at the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Maine, in 1989.
