The year 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of William Scott's arrival in Northern Ireland, the birthplace of the relationships, practices and subjects which would stay with him throughout his storied career.
Born in 1913 in Greenock, Scotland, William Scott arrived in Enniskillen on the cusp of his teenage years. One of eleven children, Scott had moved with his Scottish mother back to his father's hometown. William John Scott also worked with paint, albeit in a more practical way as a painter and decorator, but perhaps with a hidden talent that he recognised in his son, whom he arranged in 1926 to be taken on as a pupil of Kathleen Bridle at the Enniskillen Technical School.
Bridle was a British artist (with an Irish father) who had studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in the previous decade under Seán Keating, and later at the Royal College of Art, from 1921 to 1925, under William Rothenstein. Bridle was known for her cosmopolitan outlook and love of travel, and she counted Henry Moore, Raymond Coxon and Phyllis Dodd among her friends. The artist T. P. Flanagan was another of her pupils with whom she maintained a lifelong bond.
Bridle later became a founder-member of the Ulster Unit, and was elected an associate of the Ulster Academy in 1935 and an Honorary Academician in 1962. She also took part in the first Contemporary Ulster Group Exhibition in 1951. Bridle worked mainly in watercolours and landscapes, but also painted portraits, with her sitters including the young William Scott. The promising young student was depicted with great affection by his mentor, shown in his school uniform to emphasise his youth and desire to learn.
She passed on her techniques to William Scott, as well as introduced him to modern French art and contemporary art theory. The pair went out together at weekends to draw and paint, the results of which are most likely some of Scott's earliest known works such as Figures in a Street Outside O'Reilly's and an untitled pencil sketch which interprets the town with the town hall and war memorial.
Untitled (Drawing of Enniskillen from Belmore Street)
William Scott (1913–1989) 
Scott's early life in Northern Ireland, only recently partitioned, had a profound effect on the choice of subject matter which would occupy a significant portion of his career: 'I was brought up in a grey world, an austere world... The objects I painted were the symbols of the life I knew best.'
The family had only lived in Enniskillen for three years when Scott's father died. He had volunteered to try to save others in a fire at a local hotel, but his ladder broke and he fell. The County of Fermanagh Education Committee gave Scott a grant of 25 shillings a week to attend the Belfast School of Art at the age of 15, where he later described his first lesson in drawing from life:
'I was too young to be allowed to see the naked female figure directly, instead a white screen was placed in front of her and with illumination behind, we could discern a silhouette clearly and sharply. Our drawing instruction was to draw the outline cast on the screen and on this simplification of observing the figure, our drawings were undoubtedly of a linear nature.'
That this experience stayed with him in later years indicates that the seed of an artistic practice was born here: simplifying volumes to outlines and embracing the linear nature of the result.
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In 1931 Scott obtained a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools in London, having applied to the Sculpture School originally because he thought it might be easier in many ways, and transferred to the Painting School in 1934. His diploma painting, Adoration of the Shepherds (private collection), was accepted for the Royal Academy's Summer Show in 1936. It was strongly influenced by Stanley Spencer's The Betrayal which was purchased by the Belfast Municipal Art Gallery (now Ulster Museum) with proceeds from the sale of the Lloyd Patterson Bequest in 1929, and came into the national collection at a time when Scott was studying and living in Belfast.
Spencer's Betrayal is set at the rear of the family home with the artist and his brother watching a scene depicted in Saint John's gospel, as Christ is betrayed. As well as the religious subject matter, parallels with Scott's Adoration are apparent in the elevated viewpoint, angled walls and rooftops and treatment of buildings and trees.
William Scott (1913–1989) 
Scott painted, exhibited and travelled in Europe throughout the 1930s until the outbreak of war. He and his wife Mary Lucas then returned to Britain, later settling in Dublin, where his son Robert was born. He continued to paint and teach and also served with the Royal Engineers for nearly five years, lending his artistic talents to making maps.
The 1950s were a fruitful time for the artist when he began to gain recognition from private galleries and the Arts Council and British Council, who involved him in several exhibitions shown abroad including the Venice Biennale. There, his work was presented as part of a new abstract movement in British art. His style then, with its heavy impasto and recognisable object outlines, was later pared back to a flatter series of planes and simple contours, a balanced juxtaposition of volumes, boundaries and voids.
Recognition from closer to home took longer to achieve, and this was acknowledged by Anne Crookshank, Keeper of Art at the Ulster Museum (1957–1965) who wrote to Scott in 1958 to assure him that, despite not yet having acquired a painting by him, 'I hope you have heard we are making the necessary preliminaries to do this at the moment.' Scott's Brown Still Life, which depicted an abstracted saucepan and bowl in austere and earthy blacks, browns and greys, became one of her first acquisitions for the Museum.
Anne Crookshank was also instrumental in arranging for a touring William Scott exhibition to be held at the Ulster Museum in 1963, after it was shown in Berne, Switzerland. By doing so, the national museum claimed him as a Northern Irish artist and placed him within the context of the post-war abstraction Crookshank was collecting for the Ulster Museum, alongside works by artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Camille Souter and Karel Appel. There were more links: Scott and Appel had shown together at the influential Martha Jackson gallery in New York in the 1950s, where Scott had also come to know Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Some local collectors such as John Heygate, a well-connected Northern Irish journalist and novelist, recognised the significance of Scott on an international scale. Derek Hill's portrait of the writer has a Scott painting from his own collection in the background. In contrast to many of Hill's other portraits with anonymous backgrounds, the depiction of Scott's painting serves a dual purpose for artist and sitter – including it was a challenge for Hill to work in another painter's style and the careful choice and placement of the painting within the portrait represented the sitter's status and taste. The portrait was painted c.1961–1965, around the time of the unveiling of Scott's high-profile mural in Derry/Londonderry, a public artwork on which everyone had an opinion.
The Altnagelvin mural (1959–1962) was commissioned from Scott by architect Eugene Rosenberg for Altnagelvin Hospital, the first post-war NHS hospital in Britain, along with the Princess Macha sculpture by F. E. McWilliam. This abstract composition in oil over 15 plywood panels was, at the time of its unveiling, deemed 'the most controversial work of art in Ulster.'
The scale of the work was a new challenge for Scott, who had to work on the panels in groups of two or three at a time. Mark Rothko visited Scott at his studio while he was working on it and shared some of the frustrations and the lessons he had gained from completing his own mural in the Four Seasons restaurant, within the Seagram building in New York, and the two artists continued to correspond.
The Altnagelvin mural went through several stages. At one point, Scott was working with a range of bright and light colours (that were found underneath when the mural was restored in 2010). The notes and sketches he made for the mural show his ideas progressing from the imagery of ancient Ireland – such as crosses, rounded towers and double spiral motifs – to more elemental and abstract forces. These may have been inspired by prehistoric carvings in Irish passage graves and stone circles, as well as the influence of the wall paintings discovered in the Lascaux Caves, which can be seen in White, Sand and Ochre (1960–1961), which Scott worked on concurrently with the Altnagelvin mural.
It appears he may have reconsidered the direction for the mural following a closer look at the relationship with the hospital:
'In painting a mural for Altnagelvin I had two things to consider and be directed by, the building and the people in the building. The building is bold, the entrance strong and clear. I had to paint a wall to match the architecture and the setting and be right for the people.'
The darker colours of the final version – ochres, black and a range of blues – are colours that suggest the 'raw elements of an island landscape: earth, air and water'.
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Opinion in the hospital varied. Professor van Heyningen commented that 'though it tells no story, it does, if one is at leisure, seize and happily occupy the mind', but Mr J. G. Pyper, one of the medical staff at the hospital, was less positive.
'I cannot believe that this slap-dash conglomeration really conveys anything to the sane beholder other than dislike of its sheer ugliness and lack of craftsmanship. I am asking the patients' comforts fund to pay for a suitable covering screen.'
The mural was shown at the Tate Gallery in November 1961 for six weeks, prior to its unveiling. In 2014 it was exhibited at the Ulster Museum, and now forms the centrepiece and a point of pride in the atrium of the new North Wing at the hospital.
Finally, Scott's enduring links to Northern Ireland – and the esteem in which he was held by fellow artists – is demonstrated in works such as Clifford Rainey's 1976 portrait. The drawing shows Scott in lifelike detail, as if he's standing on the stage closest to an audience, lost in thought and working out the details of one of his paintings. He faces away from a huge canvas depicted in his unmistakable style. The background is a landscape of Fermanagh and its famous loughs, the lines and planes of the water, hills and grass reminiscent of the shapes in the painting as they enter from its boundaries.
F. E. McWilliam, another artist born in Northern Ireland who found international acclaim, sculpted his friends William and Mary Scott in 1956. The sculptures were later acquired by the Tate, and the maquettes are in the collection of the F. E. McWilliam Studio, Banbridge.
Now well represented in the Ulster Museum and Fermanagh County Museum collections, partly thanks to generous support from the artist's family and a local benefactor, Scott's work can also be found in major public collections around the world. He died at home in Coleford in 1989 and was buried in Enniskillen, where he felt most at home, in the grave that already contained his father as well as his youngest sister Violet, who had been born in 1928 after the death of her father. The ashes of his wife, Mary, were later added to the same grave.
Claire Dalton, art historian
