This work is registered in the William Scott Archive as number CR921. We are grateful to the William Scott Archive for their assistance in cataloguing this work.

William Scott was born in Scotland in 1913. His father, a sign-writer and house painter, was Irish and from Enniskillen; his mother Scottish. The family moved back to Enniskillen in 1924 to find a better standard of living. Showing a keen interest in art William was sent to study with Kathleen Bridle who introduced him to watercolour painting and the French tradition in art. In 1928 he attended the Belfast College of Art and in 1931 studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London. He went on to become one of few Irish artists (although Scotland can claim him also) in the post World War II period to establish a national and indeed international reputation as an abstract or semi-abstract painter.

His development as an artist followed the early Modernist pathway of moving from Naturalism towards a spare and poetic abstraction but without relinquishing the imprint of the original naturalistic or man made source. The French Modernist tradition of Cézanne, Bonnard and Braque was a potent early source of influence. He lived in France for periods in Cagnes-Sur-Mer and St Tropez in the south and at Pont Aven in the north. The wall paintings at Lascaux, which he visited in 1954, made a lasting impact.

His consistent subject matters of kitchen table still lifes and the nude female figure he worked at and distilled to an emotional and erotic essence of line, colour, shape and texture. If his cottage still lifes left their first marks on a Scottish or Ulster table, his later ones still bore their imprint. In a memorial poem to the artist, Brendan Kennelly registers their impact:

Hardly an outdoors man:
Flickering candle, domestic gold,
Bottle, basin, pot, pan:
Slowly the shapes take hold.

And will not be forgotten.
Eggs, lemons, grapes, pears:
The man walks through the kitchen,
Wanders among the stars.1

The development of his work progressed towards less and less pictorial elements (a fish, a plate, a glass). The former supporting table top, tilted á la Cezanne, now becomes the vertical pictorial ‘field’ or working ‘ground’ and his gift for placement and structural balance becomes even more assured, simple and eloquent. Of his move from the representation of objects in space to the orchestration of objects and space he has commented: “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”.2

In 1953 Scott visited New York and met Jackson Pollock and Marc Rothko among others. He was impressed by the scale and self assuredness of their work but the visit for him reinforced his Europeanism. In 1965 William Scott moved to a farmhouse near Coleford in England where there was an espaliered pear tree. He had, of course, painted pears earlier in his career e.g. Pears on a Plate, 1956/60. Now he had a constant source at hand and pears became something of a sub theme in his work. In Pears and Knife II, 1973, three pear shapes share a kind of musical notation with a plate, a knife and a glass registering a graphic and visual assonance. In 1976 he painted a series of seventeen small canvasses, entitled the ‘Orchard Series’ where the fruit sit like roosting birds painted mostly in varying shades of green and in varying dispositions. They evoke a primitive and erotic charge.

Jug and Pear, 1983, was painted in the last years of his working life before he developed Alzheimer’s disease in 1986. He died in 1989. It shows the influence of Egyptian wall painting in the flattening out of the pear and jug, allowing their outlines to do all the work. It gains its power despite its scale, from the simplicity and humour of the relationship between the two pictorial protagonists. The jug squared off and stand-offish ignores, as it were, the shapely presence of the pear in this painterly drama.

William Scott’s work is represented in many national and international collections. He has represented Britain in a group exhibition at the São Paulo Bienal (1953) and with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale (1958). He also has been included in Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1959) and Rosc, Dublin (1980). In 1986 a large retrospective of his paintings and drawings toured Ireland and Scotland and a major exhibition of his work was shown at IMMA in 1998.

Numerous exhibitions of William Scott's work continue to take place nationally and internationally, most recently from October to December 2019 in New York at the Anita Rogers Gallery titled William Scott: Paintings and Drawings; Fifties through Eighties.

Professor Liam Kelly
Belfast, October 2006

1. Brendan Kennelly, If You Were Bold Enough (in memory of William Scott), published in William Scott 1913-1989, RHA, Dublin, 1990.
2. As quoted in essay by Ronald Alley, William Scott, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealíon, 1986.