William Scott R.A.

(British, 1913-1989)

Still Life 33.4 x 43.2 cm. (13 1/4 x 17 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Possibly with Gimpel Fils, London
Rogers Senhouse Esq.,
Thence by family descent
Private Collection, U.K.

Literature
Sarah Whitfield, William Scott, Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings, 1913-1951 Volume 1, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013, p.160, cat.no.100 (col.ill.)

'I wanted to animate a still life in the sense that one could animate a figure' (William Scott, 1959)

The original owner of this lively William Scott oil painting was Roger Senhouse (1899-1970), an English publisher and translator, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group of writers, intellectuals and artists. The painting, simply titled Still Life, which has never previously been offered for sale through auction, has remained in the same family ever since. In the private letters of Lytton Strachey (published in 2005), the writer and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, it is revealed that Stenhouse was his final lover. Educated at both Eton College and Oxford University, Roger Stenhouse went on to co-found Secker & Warburg in 1935 with Frederic Warburg. Perhaps their most notable achievement was taking on and publishing a certain text by George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945), following a period of rejections and setbacks. The company merged with Harvill Press in 2005 and now trades as Harvill Secker under its parent company Penguin Random House.

The Catalogue Raisonné entry for this painting (see literature details above) states, 'All that is known about this undated painting is that it was acquired early on by the publisher and translator Roger Senhouse. It has remained in the Senhouse family. Senhouse may have purchased it through Gimpel Fils as the gallery's name is inscribed on the bottom stretcher bar and also on the back of the frame. This may tie up with a record in Scott's diary for 1949 which reads, on 27 July, "Received £35 Gimpel Still Life", and on 16 August, "Received cheque Gimpel £28-8-4". The subject and composition suggest a date of 1946 (see Cyclamen, cat.no.97). A label on the back is inscribed "William Scott/Still Life", but as the writing is not in Scott's hand, the title remains unconfirmed.' (Ed. Sarah Whitfield, Volume 1, William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings, Thames & Hudson, London, p.160).

Like many of Scott's contemporaries, during the war his artistic output severely diminished. He was posted to Ruabon in north Wales with the map-making section of the Royal Engineers, and what little time off he enjoyed was used to paint small scale watercolours, exhibited in his second solo exhibition at the Leger Galleries in 1945. Following the end of hostilities in August of that year, demobilisation was slow to occur and Scott did not take up his brushes again until 1946. When he did, still life predominated, and he was driven by a new enthusiasm following his visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum's major exhibition of recent Picassos and works by Matisse, which opened in December 1945.

Like Scott's Flowers and a Jug (1946) in the collection of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the similar palette of Still Life is ablaze with orange, red, yellow and green. Whilst the flowers are placed in the jug in the present lot, rather than lying down on the surface as in Birmingham's picture, they both lack a sense of formal arrangement, and the artist employs his characteristic device of tilting the surface of the table top so that it faces the viewer, a technique favoured by Cézanne. It is interesting to note that the colour scheme has picked up those same burning pigments laid down on canvas in his 1942 Ivy Leaves, painted before Scott's call up. Indeed, the table top is the same colour despite his three-year hiatus painting with oils (with just a handful of exceptions), and the circular white saucer or plate carries the same function as the white cloth in Ivy Leaves, punctuating the space between the still life object and table top, demonstrating the war had not interrupted his creative ideas.

For the following four years, the table top still life preoccupied William Scott, with the frying pan and fish taking centre stage. The forms became flatter and more abstract in nature whilst they are still described with the same broad, quickly applied brush strokes thick with impasto as seen in the present lot. By 1951 Scott's obsession with this subject took a radical departure as the scale of his paintings greatly increased, and the familiar objects bore little resemblance to those depicted both immediately preceding and proceeding the war.