William Scott, R.A. 1913-1989

The present work is listed with the William Scott Archive as no.1533.

Having returned from a brief essay into abstraction in the early 1950s, Scott, to a large extent, concentrated for much of the rest of the decade on the still-life subject of his early career. In 1955 and 1956, small-scale still-life paintings start to form a coherent group, using relatively few compositional elements, and it is to these works that the present painting belongs.

However, as the theme developed, the objects themselves became less and less important, their forms becoming increasingly simplified and distorted, and their importance lying in their use as formal compositional elements. Freed from a need to keep the recognisable form of the object, Scott became ever more willing to use each one as a vehicle for textural diversity, either heightening a colour contrast with the brushwork, or in some paintings, as here, using the handling of the paint itself to delineate forms within a like-coloured background. Similarly the setting of the image could be manipulated, with the suggested planes of a still life composition becoming an equally weighted element in the image. In the present work, Scott has moved away from the obvious table-top format of the earlier still-life paintings towards a narrower view using the extremes of paint to place the pan and bottle in a clear space closely pressed up against its background. A useful comparison in terms of handling and palette may be drawn with Small Pot 1956 (Private Collection), where the thinned, almost turpentine wash, background gives a luminosity that contrasts spectacularly with the thickly treated black of the bottle.

The original owner of Still Life with Black Bottle was Alfred Ordover, Vice-President of NBC and a keen supporter of young artists during the 1950s and 60s.