Four Pears on White Plate

Pears were a dominant motif in the artist's work throughout the 1950s, to appear again notably in the series of still lifes between 1973 and 1977. In his review of Scott's one-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in June-July 1953, the late painter, Patrick Heron, explains Scott's use of the still life object: 'William Scott is discovered to have abandoned the fish, the eggs, the fish-slice and the colander: yet their absence only demonstrates that what always counted most was not the quality of his still-life objects, but the quality of his pictures themselves. Here is an artist for whom literary associations count for little. The concrete reality of plastic colour and form is paramount. Extremely gifted, Scott's gifts are those of the mere painter. That is, his whole passion, his whole energy, is directed into the organisation of the picture. For such as un-English phenomenon (the painter, pure and simple) life itself and all its mystery, all the tensions of consciousness, both intellectual and sensual, are focussed in the mere arrangement of form against form, of tonal colour against tonal colour. And, of course, the powerful and original painter has a strength and directness - that of pure intuition - which quite precludes the soft picturesqueness and prettiness which so much English painting - even of an 'abstract order' - cannot escape, it seems' (see M. Gooding (Ed.), Painter as Critic, Patrick Heron: Selected Writings, London, 1998, p. 83).