William Scott, R.A.

Hanover Gallery, London
E & A Silberman Galleries, New York
R. Howard Harrison
Sale, Christie's London, 19 July 1968, lot 177
Private Collection

New York, Silberman Galleries, An Exhibition of Contemporary British Art: For the Benefit of British Council Fine Arts Collection, 12 October - 10 November 1956;
Probably Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art, Contemporary British Art, 9 July - 21 August 1957;
Bern, Kunsthalle, Victor Pasmore William Scott, 12 July - 18 August 1963, no.12;
Belfast, Ulster Museum, William Scott, 12 September - 5 October 1963, no.12.

Original canvas. There are some minor scuff marks to the top edge and two small knicks to the edges of the upper left corner. There is a small area of very feint surface craquelure to the white pigment of the pan in the centre right of the composition otherwise in excellent original condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there is a small spot of retouching in the bottom right corner otherwise there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a plaster gilt box frame.
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The present work is listed with the William Scott Archive as no. 1848 and may also have been exhibited with the Hanover Gallery in 1956 as Blue Still Life: Pots and Pans.
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.

In 1953, Scott visited New York and was one of the first European artists to experience the latest developments in American avant garde painting at first hand. He was also personally introduced to key figures such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline and Rothko in particular was to become a good friend, visiting the Scotts in England on several occasions. Having developed a unique abstract visual language during the early 1950s and having subsequently experienced the very best of the Abstract Expressionists at first hand, it is interesting that around 1955, Scott returned once again to the more traditional still life subject matter of his early career.

In 1955 and 1956, he developed a dynamic new series of large still lifes exemplified by the compositional arrangement and scale of the present work. His favourite and distinctive motif of the long handled frying pan is boldly arranged in a frieze like sequence that reverberates across the picture plane running from left to right and concluding with the confidently crossed handles of the white and black pans in the upper right corner. The forms along the right edge disappear out of the picture and contribute to the greater feeling of space both inside and outside the composition. Indeed, although it is easy to exaggerate any influence the Abstract Expressionists might have had on Scott, he explained himself that 'it was not the originality of the work, but it was the scale, audacity and self confidence' which had caught his eye in New York and which he clearly channeled into his new series (Scott, quoted in Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames and Hudson, London 2004, p.109).

The genesis for his earlier treatment of the theme in the 1940s had been 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 (Scott, ibid., p.61). Despite the seemingly 'limited' subject, the exhibition clearly left him in no doubt as to the power of the genre and its capacity for artistic creativity.

His early treatments of the subject such as The Frying Pan (1946, Arts Council Collection, London) and Frying Pan and Eggs, (1949, National Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) had focused directly on the still life at the very centre of the image, classically framed within the picture plane and set on a table top. In his new series, he combined his intimate knowledge and understanding of his favourite forms with a new and dynamic energy that hovers excitingly between abstraction and representation. He clearly delighted in the actual application of lusciously impastoed paint and the rich surface texture recalls the dramatic impact of the cave paintings on the rough rock surface at Lascaux which had been discovered in 1940 and which Scott had visited personally in 1955.

The motif of the crossed handles was particularly appealing to the artist and reappears in several of the works from the series including Winter Still Life (1956, Tate Collection) and Brown Still Life (1956, Private Collection) both strongly related to the present work.