William Scott, R.A.

Acquired directly from the Artist by Eugene and Penelope Rosenberg, March 1956

London, Institute of Contemporary Art Gallery, Architects Choice, 28th October - 29th November 1959, cat. no.35;
Wakefield, Wakefield City Art Gallery, Personal Choice 2 Exhibition, May - June 1961, cat. no.113;
London, Tate, William Scott: Paintings Drawings and Gouaches 1938-1971, 19th April - 29th May 1972, cat. no.40, illustrated.

Robert Melville, 'Pots and Pans', New Statesman, vol.83, no.2146, 5th May 1972, p.164;
Robert Melville, 'Gallery: Diverse Realities', Architectural Review, vol.CLII, no.905, July 1972, illustrated p. 56;
Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings Vol. 2, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013, cat. no.275, illustrated p.130. 

Sound board. There is slight compression and rounding to all four corners, most noticeably the bottom two. There are some very minor signs of very light frame abrasions visible upon close inspection, with a very slight surface abrasion to the centre of the top edge in the red. This excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a couple of small spots of fluorescence and probable retouchings to the red pigment along the top edge, with a few further horizontal lines along the bottom edge, most probably in keeping with an old frame abrasion. These have all been very sensitively executed. There is an unfinished study on the reverse, partially covered with newspaper. Housed behind glass in a thin gilt frame. Unexamined out of frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to the William Scott Foundation for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

In 1956, Eugene Rosenberg began a warm ongoing correspondence with William Scott, and purchased his first works by the artist, Table Still Life (the present work, 1955) and Seated Nude (1939). It was the beginning of a long friendship and working relationship, and we sense this warmth from Scott’s early letter to the architect written in March 1956 to confirm the purchase of the present painting: ‘Dear Eugene/ Thanks very much for the cheque for £100. I am very pleased that you are going to have one of my recent pictures and I accept the compliment which the cheque signifies. You know that you can come any time to see what is in my studio but in the meantime I will reserve the picture we discussed./ Yours ever/ William’ (letter from Scott to Rosenberg, 16 March 1956, quoted in Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue raisonné of Oil Paintings, Vol. II, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013, p.130).

Just two years after his initial purchases, Rosenberg commissioned Scott to paint a vast mural for the Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry, which was to be one of the major undertakings of Scott’s career and the largest piece he ever created. The hospital was designed by Rosenberg’s architectural firm YRM, which was founded in 1944, along with his partners F.R.S. Yorke and Cyril Mardall, who were also fans of Scott’s work, both having purchased pieces by the artist in the 1950s and 1960s. Yorke in fact acquired Blue Frying Pan (1956, lot 8) in 1956, which later passed into the Rosenbergs' collection.  Discussions for the mural began in that same year, with Paul Feiler initially under consideration.  Scott was however eventually deemed most suitable to undertake a public commission in Northern Ireland, possibly due to his personal connection with the country, as well as his close friendship with F. E. McWilliam, who had also been chosen by Rosenberg to complete a large scale outdoor sculpture for the hospital (see lot 101). Scott began work on the mural in 1958 and it was unveiled on the 27^th February 1962, to a relatively astounded audience. As the artist relayed to his close friend Robert Fusillo: ‘The crowd was there, the mayor was there, hospital executives were abounding, and TV cameras hummed. Speeches were assailed. Mary stepped forth and pulled down the curtain. People stared, stunned and silent. There was no sound at all. Within less than twenty minutes the room was empty’ (quoted in Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue raisonné of Oil Paintings, Vol. III, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013, p.103). The ensuing controversy reiterates how revolutionary abstract paintings remained to the British public of this period, and how bold Rosenberg’s choice of artist was for such a public project.  It certainly did not deter the architect, who continued to support Scott as one of the pioneering figures of British abstraction.  They continued to keep in touch regularly and in 1968 Rosenberg gifted Seated Nude (1939) to the Tate; Scott writing at the time to express his pleasure and thanks that the work had been offered to the institution.

In 1972 the Rosenberg’s lent Table Still Life to Scott’s first major retrospective at the Tate. Diverging from the normal layout of such retrospectives, Scott structured the exhibition into twelve groups relating to particular periods of his career. These ranged from the earliest nudes to works so recent that the majority of those in the final group still remained in the artist’s possession and the catalogue itself was subject to change. Table Still Life was a highlight of the group dating from the early fifties, and caught the attention of distinguished critic Robert Melville who writing in the New Statesman affirmed ‘The prevailing colour is a wonderfully refulgent red damped down by smears of brown. [Scott] has not painted a better picture than this’ (quoted in Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue raisonné of Oil Paintings, Vol. II, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013, p.130). Certainly, one of the most accomplished works featured in the exhibition, Table Still Life makes dramatic use of red which fills the work with vigour, the table top dazzling against the contrasting dark background. The work has a lustre that mirrors Rothko’s colour field paintings, which Scott had so admired following his visit to the US in 1953, meeting the American artist during his stay. They instantly hit it off and began an ongoing friendship, Rothko later visiting Scott in 1957 and 1959.

Although Scott has inscribed the painting with the date 1953, in his exhibition catalogue of the Tate show in 1972 Alan Bowness dates the piece to 1955, a time when Scott had begun to reintroduce recognizably figurative elements back into his still life compositions. In Table Still Life we again see the cups and bowls, spatula and iconic frying pan which were among the humble kitchen utensils that Scott kept about him in his studio, and had been utilized in his works since he began focusing on the still life in the 1940s. These elements had largely disappeared into nearly pure abstraction in many of his compositions which were painted between 1952 and 1954 and interestingly, the unfinished composition on the reverse of Table Still Life, which teeters on this line purely abstract line, very likely dates to this earlier period of Scott’s output.