Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/130999
Many people, including Hilton, envied Scott his wife's organizational skills. She was his social secretary and his resident critic, his muse, companion and (in early years) his principal model. As Norbert Lynton put it: 'He trusted Mary's judgment more than his own, and she saved many an admirable painting from being discarded or re-stretched so that he could paint anew on the back of the canvas.' Scott didn't like to waste anything, and even on one occasion painted on the back of one of Mary's family portraits. This was the frugal and committed worker that Mary loved and married. In 1941 they settled at Hallatrow in Somerset and started a market garden to feed the family and earn some money. Clifford Ellis, the Principal of Bath School of Art (later Bath Academy) took Scott on for two days' teaching a week. When he went into the Army for the War, Ellis employed Mary to teach modelling and plaster casting. Later, on demobilization, Scott became senior painting tutor. Mary and William had met at the RA Schools, Mary arriving as a sculpture student just after William transferred to the painting department. She continued with her own work, as far as the demands of motherhood permitted, but although her work was admired by gallerists and regularly exhibited, in the Scott household it was William's work that inevitably took the limelight. In December 1945 Mary's work was included in a mixed show at the Leger Galleries, with William's and Bernard Meninsky's. Later her sculptures were sometimes shown alongside her husband's paintings, and from one Hanover Gallery exhibition a sculpture was stolen. In the words of her son Robert, 'she was over the moon about it' – that someone had cared enough about one of her works to go to the extreme of pinching it. 12 Martha Jackson, the American dealer who showed William's work in New York, also liked Mary's, and included it in shows. In a 1957 letter to William she enthused over some of Mary's bronzes she had in the gallery, one of which was acquired the following year by MOMA for its art lending service. Although this implies that it was therefore considered to be a work of art that would have wide public appeal, and was thus not necessarily at the cutting edge of contemporary art, it was nevertheless a significant accolade. However, Mary was gradually giving her art less and less time. For years Mary had willingly sidelined her own work in order to look after William and promote his, but she obviously felt the neglect keenly. (In couples where both are artists, one invariably suffers.) Her frustration reached such a peak, no doubt compounded by the onset of arthritis which prevented her from working, that in 1957 or 1958, she smashed nine or ten of her terracotta sculptures. That she could reach such a nadir in her creative life is saddening, but thankfully some of her work still exists to bear witness to her considerable skills: in particular the fine standing figures here, both dating from c1956, the smaller one in bronze, the larger (at over five feet in height) in plaster. The bronze, with its thin attenuated legs and missing arms looks a little like a Giacometti, the more straightforwardly figurative plaster being reminiscent of Giacomo Manzu, but both fit in readily with other European sculpture of the period. (I am thinking in particular of Germaine Richier and Marino Marini.)