William Scott, R.A.

Gimpel Fils, London, where acquired by a Private Collection, London, 22nd January 1979
Acquired from the Estate of the above by the present owner

London, Royal Academy of Arts, British Painting 1952-1977, 24th September - 20th November 1977, cat. no.324.

Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings Vol. 4, Thames and Hudson, London, 2013, cat. no.837, illustrated p.223.

Original canvas. The canvas appears sound. There is some very slight rubbing around the edges of the work, primarily along the upper horizontal edge, with a further very small scuff just beneath the centre of the right vertical edge. There are some extremely tiny scattered lines of craquelure apparent in the white pigment along the lower horizontal edge, with one very small further line apparent in the impasto light grey pigment in the lower right quadrant. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. The work is unframed. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Scott’s commitment to the still-life genre was the defining feature of his career and the opportunity afforded by the 2013 catalogue raisonné to survey his entire output reinforces the enormity of this singular dedication and the scale of his achievements. He offered a significant and individual approach to the dilemmas of figuration and abstraction which dominated painting in the 1950s and 1960s, and continued to revise and renew his method in a radical, reductionist method throughout the last two decades of his life.

The genesis for Scott’s lifelong treatment of the still life 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' (the Artist, quoted in Norbert Lynton, William Scott, London, 2004, p.61). Despite the seemingly 'limited' subject, the exhibition left him in no doubt as to the power of the genre and its capacity for artistic creativity. By 1969, the year that marked his new series on the theme, he had developed the distinctive shapes evident in the present work - the long handled frying pan and rounded bowl. The instantly recognisable forms clearly reference early works such as The Frying Pan (1946, Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London) whilst the minimalist handling demonstrates how his work had evolved in a reductionist direction since the 1940s. 

In 1953, Patrick Heron remarked that Scott ‘has a strength and directness – that of pure intuition – which quite precludes the soft picturesqueness and prettiness which so much English painting – even of an “abstract” order – cannot escape, it seems’ (Patrick Heron, quoted in Michael Tooby and Simon Morley, William Scott, Paintings and Drawings, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p.8). Such insight is explicitly seen in the daringly sparse present work, with its elegantly constrained colour palette and the simplicity of the delineated forms. The present work is part of a group of paintings Scott completed in the 1970s, in which he works with a few basic graphic forms, placed in different arrangements against a range of monochromatic backgrounds with a wonderful matte finish - and it is in these works that the purity and force of Scott’s vision is paramount.