William Scott, R.A.

The Hanover Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owners from Martha Jackson Gallery at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, 1er Salon international de Galeries pilotes: artistes et decouvreurs de notre temps, in 1963

New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, W. Scott Recent Paintings, 24th March - 18th April 1959, cat. no.6;
New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, William Scott 1952-1962, 25th September – 20th October 1962, no cat. nos., illustrated in the exhibition catalogue pl.9;
Lausanne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts,  1er Salon international de Galeries pilotes: artistes et decouvreurs de notre temps, 20th June - 22nd September 1963, no cat. nos., illustrated in the exhibition catalogue;
London, Tate Gallery, William Scott, 19th April - 29th May 1972, cat. no.58, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.

Alan Bowness (ed.), William Scott: Paintings, Lund Humphries, London, 1964, pp.11 and 37, illustrated pl.100;
Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004, pp.207 and 212, illustrated fig.123.

Original canvas. Black adhesive tape has been attached to the edges. There is a very faint stretcher bar mark along the edges. The paint is thin about the very edges, with one or two minor spots of paint loss in the upper right corner. There are a few spots of isolated surface matter and stains. There is a circular pattern of craquelure in the white pigment near the centre of the lower edge. There is a circular mark near the lower left corner from a print-stamp to the reverse of the canvas and one or two lines of craquelure beneath this. Otherwise the work appears in good overall condition with a rich textured surface. Under ultraviolet light certain areas fluoresce but there do no appear to be any signs of retouching. Held in a wooden frame with a metallic-coloured border. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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The present work is registered with the William Scott Archive as no.99.

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.

Painted in 1958, Orange Table Top belongs to an important body of work that was executed at a critical period in the artist's career and represents the culmination of his early stylistic development. In the same year Orange Table Top was executed, Scott was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale which undoubtedly secured his International reputation.

The genesis for Scott's lifelong focus on the still life subject was 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, quoted in Norbert Lynton, William Scott, London 2004, 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. An ongoing investigation of the still life form had subsequently led to a seminal series of small gouaches in 1952 that demonstrated Scott's first experiments with pure abstraction. By the time the present work was executed in 1958, he had combined his intimate knowledge and understanding of his favourite forms with a new and dynamic energy that hovers excitingly between abstraction and representation. The vivid combination of orange and white hues literally reverberate across the canvas and Scott clearly delighted in the actual application of impastoed paint. The rich surface texture of Orange Table Top 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.