William Scott R.A.

(British, 1913-1989)

Portrait of Denise Field-Reid 82 x 56.6 cm. (32 1/4 x 22 1/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Denise Field-Reid
Private Collection
Sale; Christie's, London, 15 March 1985, lot 147 (dated circa 1931)
Private Collection
Sale; Christie's, London, 8 June 2007, lot 48 (as Portrait of Mrs Field-Reid and dated circa 1931-6)
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Fermanagh, Enniskillen Castle, William and Mary Scott - Related Drawings, Sculpture and Paintings, 29 September-4 December 1997, cat.no.21 (as Portrait of Mrs Field-Reid, circa 1932)

Literature
Denise Field-Reid, diary, 1937
Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue Raisonne of Oil Paintings, 1913-1951, Volume I, Thames and Hudson, in association with the William Scott Foundation, London, 2013, p.66, cat.no.17 (col.ill.)

Throughout his stylistic development in the late 1920s and early 1930s, William Scott's primary influences were the Post-Impressionists. Cezanne, who Scott cites frequently, was his first love in art, followed closely by Modigliani and Matisse, the latter of whose still lifes left him awe-struck on first view. But when it came to portraiture it was the former two artists that he drew from most. Scott's awareness came largely from Kathleen Bridle, his art teacher at Enniskillen, who had a superb knowledge of modern painting, and a book collection to match it. The eyes in Scott's portraits of this period draw from Modigliani, with a slight asymmetry that recalls Cezanne, both influences brought together with Scott's typically acute eye for the remarkable amongst the everyday.

Denise Field-Reid had attended the Slade Art School in 1928, around the same time as Mary Lucas, Scott's soon-to-be wife, which is probably how her and Scott became acquainted. Scott painted the bathroom ceiling of Field-Reid's London flat in 1935. Shortly after executing the current work in 1937 he would move to Brittany and start a school of painting in Pont-Aven with Mary and Geoffrey Nielson, another former Slade student; Denise Field-Reid would be one of their first students.

Denise Field-Reid sat three times for the portrait throughout March of 1937, directing Scott towards this style, more traditional than that which he would move into in 1938 with Girl Seated at a Table (Private Collection) and Girl and Blue Table (Leicester County Council). Scott would start to adopt flatter picture planes that approached abstraction with his still lifes in the coming decades, but here it is still very much the Parisian influence that we see most clearly – the eyes and facial shape are significantly more of a Modigliani style than in his preceding portraits. The background is typical of this period, with cloudy brushwork, of a simple, narrow palette, sublimely bringing out the confident elegance of his centrally placed sitter.

This work is recorded in the William Scott Archive as cat.no.1337.