‘I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and the erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life’ - Willam Scott

‘Clive Bell used to say that William Scott was the only young painter who, having encountered Picasso, had managed to absorb the impact and been able to thoroughly digest what he had taken from that master’ - Patrick Heron

From 1928, when at the age of fifteen he tried to earn money painting landscapes, to 1986, when the shape of a single pear bore witness to his love of pure form, William Scott painted more than 1,000 works in oil, all of them catalogued in this magnificently produced new publication. Each work is accompanied by an entry giving reasons for the dating, together with any documentary material relevant to its history, much of it published here for the first time.

An enormous amount of new information has been unearthed during the six years of research that has gone into this important project. This, and the close involvement of Scott’s family, has revealed a great deal more than was previously known about the artist’s life and work, and shows how both these elements had a bearing on the wider context of contemporary British art. The artist’s own papers and many hitherto unpublished letters and lecture notes have been released by his family specially for this publication.