After establishing a personal approach of his own in the early 1950s, for the rest of his career William Scott explored the same still-life themes with unfailing liveliness. Though the tactile qualities and tonality of his work developed over the course of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, a statement which he wrote in 1955 provides a clear thematic framework for all his subsequent output and suggests his fundamental interest in the relationship between representation and abstraction. My problem was to reduce the immediacy of the individual object and to make a synthesis of “objects and space” so that the new conception would be the expression of one thing and not any longer a collection of loosely related objects. While working towards this end my paintings contain greater or lesser degrees of statement of visual fact. Sometimes the object disappears and takes on a new meaning. From the early 1960s, Scott began to use a markedly lighter, often neutral tonality in his oil paintings. A white ground and related gradations of grey, black and ochre came to predominate, as in works like Six Open Forms (1971, Newport Museum & Art Gallery). Correspondingly, in his line drawings Scott came to understand and exploit the smooth white plane of the paper support. Rather than treating blank areas as negative space, the whiteness of the sheet becomes integral to the composition. In the single outlines used to form a pan or a bowl, the paper’s whiteness is transformed to become a definitive quality of the object represented – not merely an incidental property of the support. This purified palette was accompanied by a further clarification of the represented object, with everything but its most essential components excluded from the design. Aside from the ubiquitous long-handled frying pan, which remained a constant motif and immediately identifiable in Scott’s work, the collection of dinner plates, bowls and other ceramic vessels came to possess a more and more attenuated form in the 1970s. The use of a single outline was sufficient in many cases – an economy of means epitomized by many objects depicted in the series Linear Still Life Suite. This small series was a focused exploration of the most elementary pictorial unit: singly applied pencil markings made against a white ground. Other works from the series are owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Liquid Paper Corporation, Dallas. In these works, local areas of tone are established with delicate hatching, as in the saucepan’s handle in Linear Still Life Suite VI. Many objects in the series are composed using Scott’s schema of choice, first developed in the mid-1950s: the compressed oval, subtly modulated to suggest either a foreshortened dinner plate at the far side of the table or a bowl close at hand. A closely related oil painting, Linear Still Life (1973, Minneapolis Institute of Art) (fig. 1), demonstrates Scott’s esteem for these sparse, inexpressive forms. Aside from the characteristic long-handled frying pan, the composition consists of two blacked-out and four simply outlined forms. Linear Still Life Suite VI was purchased from Gimpel Fils’s exhibition of Scott’s work in autumn 1974 by Lady Glenconner (b. 1932). She was an established collector of his work and also owned an oil painting, Still Life with Eggs (1946), among other things. A granddaughter of the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Hardwicke, she was married to a Scottish aristocrat and was a long-serving Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret. Her memoirs were published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2019.