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than Scott, and quite likely influenced the thought of the older man. Scott, by contrast, led the way in painting, developing his own brand of symbolic abstraction before Heron had felt the need to move away from figuration. Roger Hilton (1911-75) was another artist in frequent contact with Scott during the seminal decade of the 1950s. They had actually known each other as students when they'd briefly overlapped at the RA Schools in 1933/4, but Scott remembered Hilton as being rather arrogant. (By that time, Hilton had already been living and studying art in Paris, and no doubt thought himself a fine young sophisticate.) In the spring of 1952, Hilton re-met Scott and FE McWilliam, former student contemporaries. The early cockiness was now gone, but Hilton was as forthright and provocative as ever, currently experimenting (at least by the end of 1953) with Mondrian-inspired abstraction. On an undated scrap of paper Hilton wrote that Scott was 'the greatest artist I know', but it's clear that the two were very close stylistically in the 1950s, and the admiration went both ways. Norbert Lynton recounts an incident of Scott copying a 1950s Hilton into his 1960 pocket diary, making an ink sketch of a painting that, in its black linear structures, looked as if it could have been by Scott himself. Of course neither Hilton nor Scott wanted to be seen to follow the other's lead, and in fact they soon diverged quite widely in aims and intentions. The moment of contiguity or parallelism was past. Nevertheless, Lynton speculates that the increased spontaneity of image and handling in Scott's work around 1960 might also owe something to looking at Hilton's concurrent work. However, the competitiveness was not always so amicable. Much to Scott's disgruntlement, at the time of his 1972 retrospective at the Tate, on more than one occasion a well-oiled Hilton rang him up in the middle of the night and harangued him over this Tate accolade: 'Why are you there? I should be there.' And he meant it. Adrian Heath (1920-92) was a key figure in the development of British abstraction, partly through personal influence (through his friendships with Victor Pasmore and Terry Frost, for instance), and partly through the informal exhibitions he organized in his London studio. The third one of these, in 1953, focusing on a wider spectrum of abstractionists besides the Constructionists he was closely involved with, included William Scott and Roger Hilton. Heath was a remarkable artist, still underrated today, who sought in his painting to reconcile the two contradictory impulses of his life: the intellectual and the sensual. He was drawn to Scott's work for similar reasons and talked of the 'mysterious ambiguity' of his still-life pictures, and suggested that Scott 'solved classical problems by romantic means'. Heath was also a tutor at Corsham from 1955 to 1976, and would have overlapped with Scott there too. Terry Frost (1915-2003) also showed at Heath's studio with Scott and Hilton, and enjoyed frequent contact with Scott during the early 1950s, on one occasion taking him to meet Ben Nicholson, on one of Scott's regular visits to St Ives. In 1952, Scott employed Frost to teach life drawing at Corsham, and when two years later he went to Leeds to become Gregory Fellow in Painting at the University, Scott wrote him a letter of recommendation. Later, when Frost moved to 9