Art Review: William Scott, Ulster Museum, Belfast

William Scott is a mystery man in Irish art. Hardly surprising when one reads his biography: born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1913, he was reared in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London, and lived in France and Italy for much of his life.

There were brief sojourns in Dublin and Derry, but he settled in Somerset, England, so his links to the Irish art world are tenuous.

The current exhibition at the Ulster Museum marks Scott’s centenary.

It has shown at the Tate St Ive’s, and the Hepworth in Wakefield, and includes important works from throughout his career, demonstrating how much more there was to his oeuvre than the ‘pots and pans paintings’ with which he is most often associated in Ireland.

Scott was nothing if not open-minded. As a young man, he was a visitor to the Ulster Museum, where he was influenced by the mischievous English painter, Stanley Spencer. Spencer’s Betrayal and JMW Turner’s The Dawn of Christianity — another huge influence — are both in the show.

Scott’s work is shown chronologically, tracing his development from a painter of landscapes and portraits to still-lifes, and the abstraction he embraced after visiting America. His interiors are probably the most impressive of his paintings, particularly those from the 1940s: there is an eerie quality to them that never really occurred again in his work. Hare and Candle is a ‘still life’ in the most literal sense, showing a dead hare stretched on a table next to a bowl of fruit.

Not all of Scott’s experiments, particularly with abstraction, were successful. His Berlin Blues paintings seem indecisive, and he was surer of his abilities when he engaged more with objects than ideas.

The exhibition also includes a number of Scott’s works on paper. Those executed in charcoal reveal it to be a medium that suited him very well indeed: Seated Girl (1953-54) is one of the more moving works in the show.