William Scott

Born in Scotland of Irish and Scottish parents, William Scott was brought up in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh where, in the mid 1920s, he received his earliest artistic training from Kathleen Bridle who had trained at the Royal College of Art with Henry Moore. He subsequently attended the Belfast College of Art, followed by the Royal Academy Schools, London where he studied sculpture and later painting from 1931 to 1935. The following three years he spent variously in France, where he ran a summer school in Brittany, and Italy. From 1939 Scott based himself in London yet kept in close contact with Ireland. He was a member of the Royal Engineers from 1942 until the end of the Second World War after which time he returned to painting. Though he painted other subject-matter, notably the human figure, Scott found his metier in the genre of still-life, favouring kitchen utensils in particular. From 1946 to 1956, Scott was senior teacher of painting at Bath Academy, then famous for it's avant-garde atmosphere.

During the early 1950's Scott visited New York where he met with Abstract Expressionist painters including Pollock, Kline, de Kooning and Rothko, one of the first European artists to do so. His experience of their work did not encourage him towards abstraction, but rather towards greater scale, increased richness of paint and a more limited colour range. Significantly however, Scott maintained his life-long esteem for French art, in particular Bonnard's saturated colours and truncated forms, Modigliani's assertive line and Cézanne’s manner of re-configuring his subject-matter. He was included in "The New Decade", an important exhibition of leading young European artists, organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1955. Three years later, Scott had a retrospective at the Venice Biennale. In the same year he was commissioned to paint a 45 foot mural for Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry, Northern Ireland, a major work which accelerated his development towards a non-figurative style. In 1966 he was awarded en O.B.E. A major retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Tate Gallery, London in 1972. His paintings are in public collections worldwide.