The title of Circles Diminishing refers to the visibly uneven, hand-painted circles of dark blue, which range in size from a single larger circle and diminish to the size of smaller ones arranged nearby. The square proportions of the canvas are echoed by the area of bright, liquid blue paint, which is positioned off-centre and the sides of which are subtly but visibly uneven. William Scott’s abstract paintings of the sixties are at once clearly organised and palpably constructed, and they combine aspects of painterly and non-painterly approaches in a personally distinctive mode. Scott’s shapes were never uniform or rectilinear, but rather pulsating and irregular; his handling of paint was never flat or characterless, but rather textured and autographic without becoming gestural. In Circles Diminishing, the juxtaposition of a bright colour against a dark one produces a spatial illusion, whereby blue appears to loom forwards from brown. The illusion translates the literal, spatial accretion of paint: the canvas was first covered with a thin, dry coat of monochrome brown paint, and the large blue square, painted afterwards, physically overlays it. In contrast to the even, deliberately inexpressive paintwork of the brown underlayer, the area of blue—painted wet on wet—is rich with effects of brushwork and impasto.

Scott began to make thoroughgoing abstract paintings in relation to his commission for a large mural at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry, which occupied him between 1959 and 1961. Throughout the fifties Scott had primarily been a painter of still life, which varied in its degree of abstraction but always had a recognisable relationship to the appearance of table-top objects. The completed mural at Altnagelvin, consisting of fifteen separate panels and measuring over thirteen metres in width, helped to free Scott from the constraints of scale that inhibited his work with still life. During two years of work, Scott developed a class of abstract, symbol-like shapes and formal units, executed in a painterly style that seemed to allow the possibility for each shape and unit to self-generate, emerge and reshape themselves. In one panel, three rounded units arranged in a column flex their edges without symmetry. Another unit is flattened along its left-hand side. Others have a blob-like quality, being more square or ovular, and some are cropped by the edges of the panel. Most important was the elastic sense of scale possessed by these shapes and units: whether large or small, they retained a convincing sense of proportion. Throughout the sixties, Scott used a similar range of symbol-like shapes in large-format canvases such as Circles Diminishing.

Following the Altnagelvin commission, Scott was able to shed the constraints of easel painting and produce paintings of a large size. In his new work he continued to use palpable painterly textures, but the organisation of colour, symbols and texture was simplified and concentrated to suit the demands of a larger tableau. Unlike Scott’s still-life paintings of the fifties, in which the surface of the canvas was approximated to the surface of a table top, in larger canvases from 1960 he began to divide the tableau into cleanly delineated compartments or clearly grouped patterns. In Circles Diminishing, the placement of smaller circles implies vertical and horizontal axes. Whereas previously the horizon line of the table top provided a spatial reference point, Scott now began to explore the edges of the canvas and to flatten the picture space. He sometimes created literal spatial layers within the painting itself, laying discrete areas of colour over a contrasting ground or exposing an underlayer by scratching through the paint surface. This spatial reorientation heightened the immediacy of the surface and encouraged a more tactile use of paint as is apparent from Circles Diminishing.

In his mature work Scott seldom used colour to describe the property of objects, but nor did he use colour arbitrarily. From painting to painting, he often concertedly developed a narrow palette of colour combinations; sometimes he used the same combinations over many years and at different phases of his career. Several paintings from 1959–61 were made with white, yellow and ochre, for example. Circles Diminishing is one of several paintings that uses bright, pale blue, a darker hue of blue, and a dark ground of black or dark brown. A closely related painting is Black, Grey and Blue (fig. 1), which similarly imposes an area of bright, liquid blue paint against a much darker ground colour.

Circles Diminishing was made at a time when Scott’s work was receiving growing international recognition. Of the mid-fifties, the curator Ronald Alley wrote: ‘By this stage in his career he had begun to have a substantial international, as well as national, reputation.’ Circles Diminishing was first displayed in 1961 at Scott’s solo exhibition at Hanover Gallery, which was then one of the eminent dealers of contemporary art in London, and which also showed artists including Francis Bacon and Richard Hamilton. The late fifties and early sixties marked Scott’s emergence as an artist of European standing. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1958 and subsequently held solo exhibitions at various galleries in the USA, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

This painting was previously owned by the Peter Stuyvesant Collection. Peter Stuyvesant was the name of a Dutch brand of cigarettes owned by Turmac Tobacco. The collection mainly included large abstract paintings by British artists, and explicitly focused on supporting young British painters. A selection from the Peter Stuyvesant Collection was publicly exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1967, which included Circles Diminishing along with works by Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Peter Lanyon, Leon Kossoff, Bridget Riley and many others.