Page 39 - Studio International - January 1965

3
__
4
1
William Scott in front of
Gaelic Landscape. 1961 /2
63 X 68 in.
Martha Jackson Gallery. New York
2
Slagheap Landscape. 1952
29 X 36 in.
Arts Council of Great Britain
3
The Frying Pan. 1 946
21 X 25¼ in.
Arts Council of Great Britain
4
Figure and Still Life ( Orange StJ/1
Life). 1956
48 X 60 in.
F. M. Hall Collection. University of
Nebraska

scholarships, marrying a fellow student and travelling
in Italy and France where he organized a school tJf
painting at Pont-Aven. During the war he served in the
Royal Engineers and did no painting at all.
Then, demobbed, he began teaching at the Bath
Academy of Art in 1946, when he painted The Frying
Pan, a key painting in his progress. The ingredients are
nothing-a frying pan, a toasting fork, a bowl on a
folded cloth, assembled on a table top. We are conscious
of the matiere, the tension in the arrangement, the overt
symbolism. The artist, talking of these still-lives has
evinced a certain shyness in describing his motives,
implying certain erotic and sexual relationships which
are scarcely necessary to comprehensive analysis. The
painting none the less recalls the gueridon series by
Braque with a more direct and simple iconography than
the French master of still life. Chardin too is present by
comparison, for Scott too imbues his objects with
personalities as protagonists.
For the next four years, Scott proceeds to the flattening
of his perspective so that while the far edge of the table
becomes a horizon, the pots are interchangeable with
boats and houses and the two ostensible subject­
matters become interchangeable and finally, in 1963,
are compromised as 'Composition.' Figures for Scott
have almost from the earliest of 1938 had the with­
drawn impersonality of pots and objects. Then we find
27