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拍品專文
Still life with candle belongs to a series of early still life painting, executed over a period that spanned roughly three years in the late 1940s. In this series Scott developed a vocabulary and manner that would see him emerge as one of the leading young British painters of the early 1950s.
Often marked by a tension between the simplicity of compositional arrangements and the richness of colour and paint handling, these paintings avoid any narrative or meaning beyond that which is directly present to the viewer. The series is frequently characterised by the apparent austerity of the objects depicted, although the current painting's subject matter is less functional than most. The presentation is kept intentionally simple and whereas discarded playing cards and an extinguished candle may have carried great symbolism in a seventeenth-century Dutch memento mori here they provide a vehicle for Scott's exploration of compositional possibilities. The ability to extract the essential compositional elements from even the most ordinary objects and create a picture of great harmony was the hallmark of Scott's painting and in a work such as Still life with candle we can see how completely Scott was able to forge the concept in his early career.
Scott had worked in France prior to 1939 and had a good knowledge of contemporary European art. In this series he acknowledges European trends in modernism. The angular areas of colour and tone Still life with candle are closely related to Picasso's still life painting of the mid-1940s. They also suggest a return to the simple still life imagery of much earlier artists Scott admired such as Chardin. A relationship with Ben Nicholson's paintings of jugs and goblets on table tops can also be seen. Scott's elegance is of an altogether different order, but Nicholson's post-Cézanne, post-cubist compositions led Scott towards great freedom. His previous antipathy towards English painting broke down as he discovered the St Ives School and Cornwall came to displace Brittany in his affections.
A very similar painting with the same title painted two years earlier is now in the collection of the National Museum and Galleries of Wales.
Often marked by a tension between the simplicity of compositional arrangements and the richness of colour and paint handling, these paintings avoid any narrative or meaning beyond that which is directly present to the viewer. The series is frequently characterised by the apparent austerity of the objects depicted, although the current painting's subject matter is less functional than most. The presentation is kept intentionally simple and whereas discarded playing cards and an extinguished candle may have carried great symbolism in a seventeenth-century Dutch memento mori here they provide a vehicle for Scott's exploration of compositional possibilities. The ability to extract the essential compositional elements from even the most ordinary objects and create a picture of great harmony was the hallmark of Scott's painting and in a work such as Still life with candle we can see how completely Scott was able to forge the concept in his early career.
Scott had worked in France prior to 1939 and had a good knowledge of contemporary European art. In this series he acknowledges European trends in modernism. The angular areas of colour and tone Still life with candle are closely related to Picasso's still life painting of the mid-1940s. They also suggest a return to the simple still life imagery of much earlier artists Scott admired such as Chardin. A relationship with Ben Nicholson's paintings of jugs and goblets on table tops can also be seen. Scott's elegance is of an altogether different order, but Nicholson's post-Cézanne, post-cubist compositions led Scott towards great freedom. His previous antipathy towards English painting broke down as he discovered the St Ives School and Cornwall came to displace Brittany in his affections.
A very similar painting with the same title painted two years earlier is now in the collection of the National Museum and Galleries of Wales.