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William Scott and Friends William Scott (1913-89) was a true Celt, the son of an Irish father and Scottish mother. Although he was born in Scotland, the family returned to his father's home town of Enniskillen in 1924. As Sarah Whitfield has observed in her excellent new monograph on Scott: 'The iron-dark greys of Greenock, the softer greys of Fermanagh, and the pale scuffed whites of the small Northern Irish houses are colours that recur frequently in Scott's painting, a reminder of the tenacious grip landscape can have on a painter's memory.' And as Whitfield points out, Scott's central concern was to develop a modern pictorial language that would allow him to exploit his innate talent for tonal painting. Looking to a range of masters that included Stubbs, Corot, Cézanne and Bonnard, Scott demonstrated throughout his post-war career that it was possible to be both avant-garde and rooted in tradition. Scott's father was a house and sign painter and young William went into the family business as a teenager (one thinks of Braque, who came from a similar background), before studying at Belfast School of Art. He then proceeded to the Royal Academy Schools where he entered the Sculpture School, transferring to the Painting course in 1934. From 1935 he visited Cornwall regularly, became acquainted with the artists who worked there, and was much struck by the paintings of the celebrated naive painter, Alfred Wallis. He married and moved out of England, settling in Pont-Aven in Brittany where he met Emil Bernard and linked up with the European modern movement. His later career was to involve a fruitful dialogue between European and American modes of painting, as much as between abstraction and figuration. From the early 1950s he learnt to use paint with weight and texture as if it were plaster, a material he was familiar with from his student days. He painted slowly but tended to draw rapidly, and wanted his art to be about something – a response to his visual surroundings – not simply pattern-making. He recognized the importance for his work of symbols and signs, emblematic shapes, and was impressed by his visit in 1955 to the Lascaux Caves, and in 1956 to the ruins of Pompeii. He was against hard-edged abstraction, believing in the importance of what the French called 'gauche' and he called 'the beauty of the thing badly done'. His work became increasingly abstracted in the 1960s, moving away from the table-top still-life paintings which had made his name and revelling in a hieratic Egyptian influence, derived particularly from low-relief carvings, culminating in a series of large paintings called the Berlin Blues (1965-7). His later work returned to a purified emblematic figuration, meditative and oriental in mood. Some artists collect art, others only hang their own work, yet others prefer empty walls. William Scott liked his paintings to hang in his home but he also enjoyed swapping his pictures with admired contemporaries, and thus built up a modest collection, some of which is still in the possession of the Scott family. William also bought works, but 7