Lot 148 : WILLIAM SCOTT, R.A. 1913-1989 STILL LIFE WITH FRYING PAN

William Scott - 1913-1989

Auction Location: United Kingdom - 2005
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Description:

signed and dated u.r.: W Scott 46

oil on canvas

CATALOGUE NOTE

Still Life with Frying Pan was painted in 1946, the year following the end of the Second World War when Scott had returned to his life at Hallatrow and to teaching at The Bath Academy of Art. A visit to the Picasso and Matisse exhibitions at the V&A over the 1945 - 1946 Winter period fuelled in the artist a desire to return to France to experience avant-garde developments at first hand. Appropriately, whilst in Paris that summer of 1946, he visited an exhibition 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 as quoted by 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.

On return from France he began a fresh series of still lifes of which the present work is a fine example. He chose particular objects, 'a frying pan, a few eggs, a toasting fork, objects without much glamour; I wanted my pictures to have a painting not literary success' (Scott as quoted by Lynton, op.cit., p.76). In being 'totally uninterested' in the objects themselves, he was able to use them more specifically as the means through which to experiment with shape, tone, colour and form. On a personal level, whilst simple, they were also objects reminicent of his childhood in Enniskillen.

The angular treatment of the white cloth, its folds reduced to their bare minimum together with the simplified line of the other objects is prophetic of the path to abstraction Scott was to follow in the next decade. However, whilst simplified, the forms find their antithesis in the luxurious rich colouring Scott chose to depict them, heightened by the azure blue in the background. The combination results in a striking effect; an exemplary representation of his 'painting success'.