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Artist: William Scott CBE RA (1913-1989) Title: Still Life (1988) Signature: signed 'W. SCOTT' lower right, dated 1988 and numbered 39/100 Medium: lithograph in colours - numbered 39 from an edition of 100 Size: 57.80 x 77.30cm (22.8 x 30.4in) Framed Size: 82 x 100.5cm (32.3 x 39.6in) Provenance: Private Collection a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} William Scott’s distinctive work is immediately recognisable for its quietness, its beauty and above all for its assured control and composition. In Scott’s finest work, less is always more. Born in Greenock, Scotland, Scott, aged eleven, moved with his family to his father’s home town of Enniski... Read more William Scott Lot 5 - 'Still Life (1988)' Estimate: €4,000 - €6,000 William Scott’s distinctive work is immediately recognisable for its quietness, its beauty and above all for its assured control and composition. In Scott’s finest work, less is always more. Born in Greenock, Scotland, Scott, aged eleven, moved with his family to his father’s home town of Enniskillen where his father, a housepainter and decorator, died in a fire accident when Scott was fourteen. His widow and their eleven children were supported by the local community and Scott, whose talent was obvious from an early age, attended Kathleen Bridle’s art classes whose ‘teaching influence on me’, Scott said ‘was profound’. He learnt from her ‘a new way of looking’ where ‘the familiar is transformed’. Scott speaks of being ‘brought up in a grey world, an austere world, the garden I knew was a cemetery and we had no fine furniture. The objects I painted were the symbols of the life I knew and the pictures which looked most like mine were painted on walls a thousand years ago.’ Many of his early work, from the 1930s, were colourful and figurative but gradually Scott became master of the kitchen-table still life. His domestic subject matter included plates, jugs, bowls, a knife, fruit, a mackerel, a frying pan, an egg, a toasting fork. The work became more and more minimalist and Scott said ‘I find beauty in plainness’. In 1953 Scott was in New York where he met Mark Rothko Willem de Kooning and was, apparently, the first European to visit Jackson Pollock Their version of abstract expression was not for him. “I wanted a picture to be about something’, he claimed, adding ‘I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract.’ Scott was influenced by how the New York Abstract Expressionists worked large scale and as a result he began to work on bigger canvases. What Dorothy Walker [in Modern Art in Ireland] calls Scott’s ‘more crowded paintings of the late forties and early fifties’ led to his later ‘serene and easeful paintings’. This lithograph, Still Life, is both serene and easeful. A kitchen, with its pots and pans, can be a place of commotion and clatter. Here, one bowl and two lines, one vertical in Yves Klein blue, the other, a Burnt Sienna line, lower left, edging the lithograph form a harmonious and elegant composition. ‘What interests me’, says Scott, ‘in the beginning of a picture is the division of spaces and forms’. Space and form are expertly handled in Still Life, creating what Hilton Kramer in The New York Times calls ‘the poetry of pictorial space’. The simple, outlined bowl contains a lighter shade and that lighter shade is also found top left. But it’s the subtle presence of those two bold colours, blue and rust-brown, as they shade the work that gives this lithograph an extraordinary and special quality. Still Life is dated 1988. William Scott died in December 1989. Scott’s work is included in prestigious and permanent collections in Canada, Australia, Austria, the US, Finland, Germany, Italy, the UK and in the Hugh Lane, IMMA, the National Gallery of Ireland and TCD. Niall MacMonagle August 2022