William Scott, R.A.

Private Collection
New Art Centre, London
Mr. John K. Trew
Waddington Galleries, London
Private Collection
Sale, Sotheby's London, 14th March 1979, lot 177, where acquired by the present owner

Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings Vol. 2, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013, cat. no.224, p.70, illustrated.

Original canvas, the work is float-mounted, with the extreme edges visible, with minor signs of slight ware to the extreme edges. The canvas undulates slightly down the bottom left hand side. The canvas appears to have been re-stretched at some stage. There are areas of fine reticulation to the top centre of the composition; to the yellow pigment and to the the central brown belt in the right hand side of the composition. There is craquelure visible to the white and to the yellow pigment, and areas in the bottom centre of the composition, as well as elsewhere in one or two places, visible upon very close inspection. This excepting the work appears in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals areas of fluorescence and probable retouchings to the extreme edge in the bottom right hand quadrant, with further very minor flecks appearing to the red pigment in the lower right hand quadrant and a spot in the upper left hand quadrant with one or two further flecks appearing elsewhere to the extreme edges. Elsewhere there is a small area of fluorescence to the central brown pigment in the right hand side and the far left yellow lemon. Housed in a black wooden frame, float-mounted against a white backing. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

We are grateful to the William Scott Archive for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work, which is registered with the William Scott Archive as number 1330.

`The actual touch and the way I put paint on canvas matters very much… I am extremely interested in textural qualities – the thick paint, the thin paint, the scratched lines, the almost careful–careless way in which a picture’s painted…’ (Scott quoted in Alan Bowness, William Scott: Painting, Lund Humphries, London, 1964, p.11).

Painted in 1952-1953, Still Life with Fruit was executed during a critical period in Scott’s career when his reputation was evolving both at home and internationally. The 1950s were a time of excitement in British Art with a developing awareness of America and the beginning of a new artistic dialogue across the Atlantic. This work was probably painted in the same year as Scott’s first trip to New York in 1953.

Despite painting nudes and landscapes, the still life was Scott’s major preoccupation. While the genre of still life linked Scott with a long-standing art-historical tradition, his treatment of the subject established him as a thoroughly modern artist. Scott approached the subject not in naturalistic terms; rather he used components of still life in his exploration of space, colour and form. In his canvases, his primary concern was not to depict the objects accurately but to experiment with the relationship between the forms of the objects and the planes of bold colour in which they sit. 

`My problem was to reduce the immediacy of the individual object and to make a synthesis of "objects and space" so that the new conception would be the expression of one thing and not any longer a collection of loosely related objects. While working towards this end my paintings contain greater or lesser degrees of statement of visual fact’ (Scott quoted in The New Decade, 1955, reprinted in Michael Tooby and Simon Morley (eds.), William Scott Paintings and Drawings, (exh. cat.), London, 1998, p.31).     

In Scott’s early treatments of the still life, he placed simplified and flattened utensils on clearly discernible tables in a flat minimalist style, for example The Frying Pan 1946, (Arts Council Collection, London). However, by the 1950s, having met Ben Nicholson, Scott was influenced further into abstraction. His canvases from this time become more textured, the table-tops become rectangles of pure colour and the forms blur into each other with the original objects becoming barely discernible.

Still Life with Fruit is a visually striking work which displays Scott’s exploration of the division of space in the structure of his paintings. The viewer’s eye is drawn at first to the luminous white square at the centre of the work, while the still life subject is offset to the left and only noticed on second glance. During this period Scott was particularly preoccupied with the surface of his paintings: `The actual touch and the way I put paint on canvas matters very much… I am extremely interested in textural qualities – the thick paint, the thin paint, the scratched lines, the almost careful–careless way in which a picture’s painted…’ (Scott quoted in Alan Bowness, William Scott: Painting, Lund Humphries, London, 1964, p.11). In Still Life with Fruit, the heavily applied swirls of yellow impasto representing the fruit, contrast with the combinations of earthy red hues which form expressive rhythms of rich texture to the paint surface.