William Scott

Hanover Gallery, London, 1957
Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich, 1959 
Acquired by the present owner circa 1959

Zurich, Galerie Charles Lienhard, William Scott, 11th November - 12th December 1959, cat. no.6.

The canvas undulates slightly in each corner and stretcher marks are visible along the lower and left edges. There is some slight cracking in the white paint and a fleck of paint loss in the centre of the cracking. Otherwise the paint surface appears to be in good overall condition. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held in a rectilinear wooden frame with a canvas cross section. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The present work is registered with the William Scott Archive as no. 2314. Sarah Whitfield is currently preparing the Catalogue Raisonné of works in oil by William Scott. The William Scott Foundation would like to hear from owners of any work by the artist so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue or in future projected catalogues. Please write to Sarah Whitfield, c/o Sotheby's, 20th Century British Art Department, 34-35 New Bond Street, London, W1A 2AA.

Painted in 1957, Red Still Life belongs to an important body of work that was executed at a critical period in the artist's career and represents the culmination of his early stylistic development. The instantly recognisable forms of the round bottomed bowl and glass became trademarks of Scott's mature style and crucially, in the same year Red Still Life was executed, Scott was selected to represent Britain at the 1958 Venice Biennale which undoubtedly secured his International reputation.

The genesis for Scott's lifelong focus on the still life subject was a visit to an exhibition in Paris in the summer of 1946 entitled A Thousand Years of Still Life Painting which left him 'really overwhelmed by the fact that the subject had hardly changed for 1000 years, and yet each generation in turn expressed its own period and feelings and time within this terribly limited narrow range of the still life' (Scott, quoted in Norbert Lynton, William Scott, London 2004, p.61). Despite the seemingly 'limited' subject, the exhibition clearly left him in no doubt as to the power of the genre and its capacity for artistic creativity.

His early treatments of the subject such as The Frying Pan (1946, Arts Council Collection, London) and Frying Pan and Eggs (1949, National Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) had focused directly on the still life at the very centre of the image, classically framed within the picture plane and set on a table top. An ongoing investigation of the still life form had subsequently led to a seminal series of small gouaches in 1952 that demonstrated Scott's first experiments with pure abstraction. By the time the present work was executed in 1957, he had combined his intimate knowledge and understanding of his favourite forms with a new and dynamic energy that hovers excitingly between abstraction and representation. The vivid combination of red, orange and white hues literally reverberate across the canvas and Scott clearly delighted in the actual application of impastoed paint. The rich surface texture of Red Still Life recalls the dramatic impact of the cave paintings on the rough rock surface at Lascaux which had been discovered in 1940 and which Scott had visited personally in 1955.