WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART MONDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2022

84 55 William Scott CBE RA (1913-1989) CHINESE ORANGE III, 1969 gouache signed and dated lower right 27 by 40in. (68.6 by 101.6cm) Frame Dimensions: 38 by 50.5in. (96.5 by 128.3cm) Provenance: Collection of Lord Hesketh deceased; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; Private collection The present gouache was painted by William Scott in 1969. 1 In that year, around twenty gouache paintings by Scott were shown at the Richard Demarco Gallery during the Edinburgh Festival. 2 As this work demonstrates, the artist had developed a distinctive approach to his imagery, in particular the conflation of still life with abstraction. Over the decades, Scott had worked through a range of figurative themes, that is imagery that is evidently drawn from the tangible physical world - landscape, the nude, still life - distilling and simplifying the forms until, eventually, they gave way to full abstraction with his celebrated Berlin Blues series in the mid 1960s. Scott’s approach to still life imagery was ground-breaking; initially prompted by the work of Chardin, Matisse, and Bonnard, he looked to the familiar domestic environment of his working class origins for his forms, explaining that: “the objects I painted were the symbols of the life I knew best.” 3 William Scott did not represent these objects naturalistically, however; rather, he seems less interested in their purposes than in their shapes, attracted to their potential for abstraction. Suggestive of a loose arrangement, strewn on a rectangular table-top, Scott simplified the kitchen objects into flat shapes, carefully placed and spaced across the surface of the painting to emulate their everyday reality. While earlier versions of the domestic theme in Scott’s work often appear crowded and even chaotic, by the 1960s, a more airy and spacious aesthetic is in evidence. The majority of Scott’s artworks at this time are titled for their colours, and this work is no exception. While ‘Chinese orange’ suggests the spherical form of the fruit, the phrase alludes in particular to the orange-red tone that appears recurrently in his work. Scott has utilised the paint medium to create a slight ‘halo’ effect along the outlines of some of the objects. However minimalistic they may appear, their artistic hand-painted quality contrasts to the strict precision of ‘hard edge’machine-aesthetic art that emerged in the US in the 1950s. In Scott’s paintings, such object-forms resonate visually against their background. The ‘cut off’ element of the first object on the left, whose profile evokes a heat-blackened pan, draws on late nineteenth-century artistic practice under the influence both of Japanese prints and of the emerging significance of photography. In Scott’s work it suggests that the image continues beyond the picture frame, into the ‘real’ world. Through such methods, William Scott’s work hovers between abstraction and experience. Dr Yvonne Scott, August 2022 1. It is identified in the online William Scott Catalogue Raisonné, under ‘Works on Paper’ as ‘Chinese Orange III’. 2. Norbert Lynton, William Scott, London 2007, p.466. 3. Lawrence Alloway, Nine Abstract Artists, their work and theory, London 1954, p.37, quoted in ibid., p.30. €40,000-€60,000 (£34,480-£51,720 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot55