William Scott, R.A.

Leicester Galleries, London
Sale, Sotheby's London, 21st May 1986, lot 238, where acquired by Redfern Gallery, London on behalf of the present owners

Possibly London, Leicester Galleries, The Recent Paintings of William Scott, October 1948, cat. no.16, 25 or 28;
Athens, British Institute, Modern British Paintings 1942 - 1947, October - November 1947, cat. no.41 and touring to Rome, Galleria Palma, Paris, Galerie René Drouin, Marseille, Ecole des Beaux Arts, Prague, Exhibition Hall Svazceskeho dila.

 

Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames and Hudson, London 2004, p.68.

Original canvas. There is an old pinhole in the upper right corner, a small speck of paint loss in the bottom left corner, some very feint lines of minor surface craquelure scattered to the black pigment of the sitter's skirt, and two old indentations to the surface in the bottom right quadrant to the right of the sitter's leg, one which may have penetrated the canvas. Otherwise in excellent overall condition. Under ultraviolet light, there are some minor old retouchings to the two aforementioned dents, most likely the hand of the artist, otherwise there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a plaster gilt frame under glass; unexamined out of frame. 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. 1305. 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.

Executed in 1946, Nude belongs to a rare and early group of works depicting the artist's wife Mary which were painted in the years before and immediately after the Second World War. Scott had met Mary Lucas, a fellow artist and sculptor, at the Royal Academy Schools and having married in May 1937, they travelled together to Italy and France before moving to Pont-Aven in 1938 where they set up a small painting school with Geoffrey Nelson.

Scott's travels with Mary and their first hand experience of European Art in the years leading up to WWII were crucial to Scott's stylistic development. He later recalled that 'Continual figure painting made me aware of the great paintings of nudes. The pictures I had in mind amongst the Old Masters were Cranach, Titian, Giorgione, Goya, Boucher, and among later paintings, Corot, Manet, Gauguin, Modigliani, Bonnard and Matisse' (Scott, quoted in William Scott, exh.cat., Tate Gallery, London, 19^th April – 29^th May 1972, p.65). His new experiences stimulated an innovative departure from his rigorous Royal Academy training and he forged a dynamic and original style exemplified by the subtle stylisation and reduction of form evident in the present work. Moreover, in Pont-Aven, he cannot have failed to have noticed the legacy of Gauguin and his synthetist experimentations with colour and tone and he even met two of Gauguin's followers Emile Bernard and Maurice Denis. More specifically however, the present work also demonstrates the artist's knowledge and understanding of Picasso and of his neoclassical nudes from the 1920s such as Large Bather (1921, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris) as well as the earlier, angular cubist forms of his seminal Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York).

During the war, Scott had volunteered for the army, serving first in the Royal Army Ordnance Survey and then in the map-making division of the Royal Engineers and although he did paint during that period, he essentially had a 6 year break and said himself that 'these paintings, done in very difficult conditions, were not really a continuation of what I had started in Brittany' (ibid, p.68). In Pont-Aven, he had focused before the war on Mary and the female figure in images such as Girl on Beach 1939 (sold in these rooms, 10^th March 2005, lot 37) and Seated Nude (1939, Tate Collection, London). He returned to the subject immediately after the war in 1946 and as such, the present work occupies a unique and highly important position in this early series. It represents the climax of his early style as in the same year, 1946, Scott moved on to focus on the Still Life subject matter that was to become the most recurring theme throughout his career.