William Scott 1913-1989
Fish and Frying Basket, c.1956
oil on canvas
25¾ x 35¾ ins


Literature
William Scott Foundation, recorded as Archive No. 1668



This richly coloured and boldly painted still-life bears a striking resemblance to the Tate Gallery’s monumental composition Winter Still-Life of 1956 notably in the almost identical arrangement of pots, pans and fish-fryer to the right hand side of the painting and, though not signed or dated, it almost certainly belongs to the same year. This was a period of some significance in Scott’s life as his work, which had been moving in an increasingly abstract direction for some years before, now returned to a more clearly figurative style. This shift had been prompted by his reaction to a visit he had made to New York two years before when he had met many of the Abstract Expressionist painters - Jackson Pollock, Kline and Rothko among them. While admiring, and also adapting to his purposes, the scale and freedom on which they working, it had also made him realise more clearly how strong his roots in European art were, above all his feelings about Bonnard, a painter he had always greatly admired, and the emotional inspiration behind this work. It was not until the summer of 1956 however, when he finally stopped teaching full-time after 10 years at the influential Bath Academy of Arts at Corsham, that he found the time to immerse himself in what amounted to a serious reappraisal of his whole approach to the subject of the still-life.

Returning to his studio in some converted cow-sheds and stables at Hallatrow in Somerset, he first completed a series of massive charcoal drawings of kitchen still-lives, many of them containing fish as here, that formed the basis of a much admired and seminal group of paintings that were shown that autumn at the Hanover Galleries. He later wrote of this period how he 'felt during these years that much abstract art had reached a point of mere pattern-making and, without a desire to illustrate, I wanted a picture to be about something.'