William Scott, R.A.

Acquired by the previous owner, 1950
Their sale, Christie's London, 25th November 1993, lot 1 (as Girl at Table), where acquired by David Bowie

Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings Vol. 1, Thames and Hudson, London, 2013, cat. no.28, illustrated p.76.

Original canvas. The canvas appears sound. There is a faint stretcher line visible along the edges. There are some fine, scattered lines of craquelure and reticulation across the work. There are some extremely tiny associated flecks of loss, including but not limited to a small fleck beneath the signature, to the table underneath the vase, to the red flowers at the right edge of the vase, and to the lower left vertical edge, with one or two possible tiny flecks elsewhere. There is some light surface dirt in places and some small flecks of studio detritus and matter, including to the figure's left shoulder and to the right of her face. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals some small flecks of retouching to the left and right vertical edges, with one or two tiny flecks of retouching to the red flowers at the right side of the vase. The work is presented in a simple wooden frame with a gilt slip. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Having spent the winter months travelling through Italy, Scott arrived in Pont-Aven in the Spring of 1938 accompanied by his wife Mary. Once an artist’s colony best known as a result of its association with Gauguin and the other post-Impressionist painters who had gathered there in the 1880s, Pont-Aven held a considerable appeal for the young artist. The months Scott spent there in 1938 and over the summer of the following year, mark an important point in his artistic development as he began to develop some of the stylistic traits that would define his mature work.  

His travels through Italy – visiting the artistic centres of Florence, Rome and Venice – had reacquainted him with the work of the early Renaissance painters and his exposure to the French post-Impressionists such as Cézanne, Gauguin and Bonnard convinced him of the need to move towards what he described as a ‘primitive realism’. Scott had been similarly struck when he saw the work of Alfred Wallis whilst visiting Cornwall in 1936, and his paintings from the late 1930s show him beginning to absorb these different influences, developing a style that combined an austerity of form with an expressive handling of paint.

Girl Seated at a Table is one of a number of compositions from the period in which Scott incorporated a figure with a still life subject. Discussing two very similar works (Girl at a Table and Girl and Blue Table) from the same year, Alan Bowness describes them as: ‘the portents of Scott’s later style. They evince a strong debt to Cézanne, of course, but certain personal characteristics are already evident – the combination of figure and still life, the care taken over the composition and the exact placing of the objects, the emptiness and simplicity, the richness of the paint surface’ (Alan Bowness, William Scott: Paintings, London, 1964, p.6). The same description is true of the present work which is carefully composed to create a dynamic between the female figure (for whom the artist’s wife Mary was the model), the colourful exuberance of the vase of flowers and muted simplicity of the background. This combination, which balances the actual (of woman and flowers) with the abstract (of the angled table top and empty background), anticipates the pared down aesthetic that he would develop to such acclaim over the following decades.