William Scott

Private Collection, United Kingdom

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1982

Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, William Scott: Paintings and Drawings, 1998, p. 73, no. 39, illustrated in colour

Hastings, Jerwood Gallery, William Scott: Divided Figure, 2013

Belfast, Ulster Museum, William Scott, 2013-14

Hugh Wood, Staking Out the Territory and Other Writings on Music, London 2007, n.p., illustrated in colour

Sarah Whitfield, Ed., William Scott: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol. 2, London 2013, p. 230, no. 355, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is browner in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some short drying cracks in places throughout, most notably to the black pigment, to the brown pigment in the centre left of the composition and to the light blue pigment in the top right quadrant. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Still Life is a singular work by William Scott, at once encapsulating some of the most important themes from this artist’s praxis – tactility, domesticity, humble beauty – and also aptly demonstrating the influence that he took from his abstractionist peers on both sides of the Atlantic. The 1950s were a breakthrough decade for Scott, culminating the year after this work’s creation with the British Council’s selection of twenty of his paintings for display at the Venice Biennale. As such, the present work is expectedly impressive; the product of an artist at the height of his powers and brimming with executional acuity and creative verve.

In keeping with the most celebrated works from Scott’s career, Still Life hovers in the thin margin between figurativism and abstraction. Rhomboid shapes of blue and grey are pasted into a background of deep brown-black, punctuated with smaller pebble-like passages of white. The composition is then enlivened by the linear articulations of hot saturated orange, which trace and weave around its chromatically quieter forms in hasty waxy stripes. In the middle of the work, we can recognise the pots, pans, and domestic tableware that populate many of Scott’s more figurative works. The textural variance across the entirety of this composition is hugely pronounced and in this capacity, the work should be considered a consummate success according to Scott’s own criteria: “The actual touch and the way I put paint on canvas matter very much… I am extremely interested in textural qualities – the thick paint, the thin paint, the scratched lines, the almost careful-careless way in which a picture’s painted. I don’t like a picture painted with too much know-how” (William Scott quoted in: Alan Bowness, Ed., William Scott: Paintings, London 1964, p. 11). Moreover, in keeping with the very best of Scott’s praxis, there is an emphasis on draughtsmanship and line throughout. We are reminded of Terrence Flanagan’s comments at Scott’s funeral: “Throughout his life, William perfected his drawing: everything he did evolved out of it and I held him to be one of the most singular draughtsmen of his time. He drew to find his subject and to find himself. Rather like that concept which Seamus Heaney has of the poet rhyming ‘to set the darkness echoing.’”

To pigeonhole Scott as a British painter would be to somewhat miss the thrust of his oeuvre. Although he was born in Scotland and raised in Northern Ireland, he lived in both France and Italy before the start of World War II. He was also particularly affected by a trip to America in 1953, where he met the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, and developed a relationship with gallerist Martha Jackson, who would exhibit his work the following year alongside Francis Bacon and Barbara Hepworth, and in solo shows for years to come. Jackson was introduced to Scott’s work when James Johnson Sweeney, the highly influentialy curator of MoMA, wrote to her having seen the artist’s work at the Hanover gallery. The present work reminds us of his emphatic remark: “At last, England has a painter!” (James Johnson Sweeney quoted in: Sarah Whitfield, Ed., William Scott: Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings, Vol. 2, London 2013, p. 18).

To this end, we might examine the extensive assimilation of international influence in Scott’s style, as displayed in the present work. The artist founded a painting school in Brittany in 1939, thus French influence is expectedly important: we can observe the chunky bravado of Nicolas de Staël in the blue grey forms abounding in the present work, and the facility and brevity of Jean Dubuffet in the cursive orange delineations; Dubuffet was another artist who also relished the textural qualities of his works, and certainly executed paintings in a comparably careful-careless way. However, America was perhaps even more important to Scott. He was the first British artist to ever visit Jackson Pollock’s studio, and he developed a close friendship with Mark Rothko. However, in the present work, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline seem more relevant; we can observe the steep flatness of de Kooning’s quasi-abstractions, stacked up the canvas with no attempt made at recessional depth, while from Kline Scott appears to have inherited the dark lugubrious palette and the preference for diagonal linear attack.

Although British by nationality, Scott artistically eschewed his Scottish-Irish roots, keeping one foot in France and one foot firmly planted in the Abstract Expressionist movement of America. These international influences galvanised his singular oeuvre and imparted the immense sense of depictive freedom and inventive dynamism that the present work displays in abundance.