William Scott, R.A.

Hanover Gallery, London, sold to Colonel Aubrey Gibson, 18 July 1955
Aubrey Gibson Collection, Melbourne
Sotheby's, London, 19 June 1974, lot 151, whence purchased by the present owner's family

Melbourne, Victorian Artists Society Galleries, 1956;
Melbourne, Georges' Gallery, British Painting, 1900-1965, April 1966;
Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Aubrey Gibson Collection, 28 July-17 September 1969, No.84, illustrated. 

Art and Australia, Vol.2, No.3, December 1964, illustrated.

The canvas is unlined. Light stretcher marks are visible along all four edges of the canvas. There are two tiny spots of paint loss, one in the upper right quadrant and one on the spot of brown impasto in the upper left quadrant. There are some very minor areas of abrasion where the paint edge meets the canvas. Inspection under ultra-violet light reveals no retouching. Held in a simple gold and black painted wooden frame.
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This work is registered in the William Scott Archive as no.1672.
Sarah Whitfield is currently preparing the Catalogue Raisonné of works in oil by William Scott.  The William Scott Foundation would like to hear from owners of any work by the artist so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue or in future projected catalogues.  Please write to Sarah Whitfield c/o Sotheby's, 20th Century British Art Department, 34-35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA.

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 significant, the 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 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 familiar objects into a clear space closely pressed up against its background.

Colonel Aubrey Gibson (1901-1973), the first owner of the present work, was a great patron of the arts in Australia and stood as trustee, treasurer and deputy chairman of the National Gallery of Victoria between 1956-1964.