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Banbury (in 1963), Scott helped him to get part-time teaching at an art school in Coventry. If Scott played something of the mentor to Frost, nevertheless the ebullience and invention of Frost's own work was not lost on the older artist, and perhaps an echo of Frost's circular road sign paintings can be discerned in Scott's Berlin Blues. Herbert Ferber (1906-91) was an Abstract Expressionist sculptor who trained simultaneously as an artist and a dentist, using his dental skills to support his art in the early part of his career. He was Rothko's friend and dentist, and knew most of the Abstract Expressionists, being closely allied in his own work with the New American painting. He is best known as a sculptor of open spiky forms in welded or soldered metal, such as the twisting structure of Cage 1 (1954), made from soldered copper and brass with lead. Lead was one of his favourite early materials, and enabled him to work thinly to make surrealist-influenced sculptures in which the space and the forms become equally important. His work is represented in numerous public collections such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Allbright-Knox Art Gallery and the Whitney Museum in New York. The Scott painting which was swapped for Cage 1 was thought to be gifted by the Ferbers to an American University and remains untraced. Not all paintings were so fortunate. The Scott swapped for Heron's Red Verticals (March 1957) is thought to have been destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire of 2004, when so many of Heron's own paintings were tragically lost. Others have also been dispersed. The Scott swapped for the Heath was later sold, as was the Scott traded for the Frost. 10 The Hilton Scott cannot currently be traced, but the exchange seems to have taken place in the mid 1950s, judging from the style of the Hilton. There was also a swap with FE Mc William (1909-92), but both items have subsequently changed hands, the sculpture now residing in a private collection in Ireland and the Scott in the Tate Collection, accepted in lieu of estate duties. (This is a particularly fine oil from 1958, an abstracted, up-tilted tabletop on wire-thin legs, entitled Black Painting.) Interestingly, Scott didn't tend to hang the works he acquired (he liked to have examples of his own work on the walls to show to prospective clients: he and Mary entertained quite extensively), but there was one exception that Robert Scott remembers – the Roger Hilton painting. This was visible at home, and its presence must surely indicate enhanced respect for this artist. Scott may not have relished the massed competition from his contemporaries that hanging all their work might have entailed, but he was prepared to face the challenge (and stimulation) of Hilton. This is revealing. In 1963, Scott acquired an impressive small painting by Alfred Wallis (1855-1942), as the result of a trade with Jim Ede, the distinguished collector and founder of Kettle's Yard – his home in Cambridge which later became a museum. Scott had been drawn to the primitive realism of Wallis since he first saw his work in the 1930s. The Wallis he bartered for is entitled Houses with Horse Rider, a 1930s mixed media painting on board, a typical Wallis treatment with a wonderfully oblique reference to Kandinsky's horse and rider motif. Sections of it also look rather like Scott's 1950s compositions. As the critic Edwin