LONDON.- A painting by the Greenock born artist William Scott has been donated to the McLean Museum and Art Gallery by the William Scott Foundation. The painting, Breton Landscape, belongs to a series of works painted in either 1938 or 1939 when Scott was living in Brittany. Although the landscape is of France, the plain, white houses bring to mind the Celtic crofter’s cottages with which Scott was familiar from his childhood days in Scotland and Ireland. The stark division and flattening out of the picture plane, however, together with the simple forms reveal Scott’s awareness of the work of contemporary artists Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson. Scott brought the painting back with him from France, and it remained with the artist until his death in 1989. In 2013 it was included in the major touring exhibition held at Tate St Ives, the Hepworth Wakefield and the Ulster Museum, Belfast, to mark the centenary of Scott’s birth. Mounted in collaboration with the William Scott Foundation, this exhibition brought together works from major collections across the UK and Ireland, as well as important loans from public and private collections.

From the time his work was first exhibited, at the 1938 Salon d’Automne in Paris, up until the 1980s, artist William Scott CBE RA (1913 – 1989) was a key figure in European and American art and is considered one of the most influential British painters of the 20th century. He is represented in many collections in the UK and abroad including the Tate collection, the Ulster Museum, the Scottish National Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum. Breton Landscape will be a welcome addition to the McLean Museum and Art Gallery’s collection, which until now had only a Scott print donated by the Scottish Arts Council.

Over the course of his career, Scott exhibited widely; in London, America, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, Canada and Australia, as well as Belfast and Dublin. He never forgot his links with Scotland, however. In 1948, he submitted work to the Royal Scottish Academy annual exhibition, the first of several occasions on which he exhibited in Scotland. In the 1960s, the Inner Hebridean islands were the source of inspiration for a group of prints which he produced in partnership with the Curwen Studios. The first of these was called Arran, after the island of which Scott was especially fond. Around the same time, he began working with Alastair Morton, the director of the Edinburgh Weavers, translating his designs into textiles, some of which also had their roots in the landscape of Scotland, for example Skara Brae and Skaill. Today in Scotland, Scott’s pictures continue to be worked into tapestries, by the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh.

The artist’s sons, James and Robert, directors of the William Scott Foundation in London, realise the importance of their family’s link to Greenock, and said: "We have strong Celtic ties; our grandmother was born in Glasgow and our grandfather in Northern Ireland. Our father, who would have been 102 yesterday (15 February 2015), worked his way from Greenock to exhibit internationally, with major works in important museums. We feel that it is only right that the McLean Museum and Art Gallery should have a work by our father in its collection as a tribute to the town where he was born.”

Inverclyde Council's Education and Vice-Convenor Martin Brennan said: “We are delighted to accept this wonderful work by internationally renowned, Greenock born, artist William Scott for the McLean Museum’s collection. It is a great pleasure and privilege to be able to add Breton Landscape, 1938 or 1939 to Inverclyde’s collection, enabling the local museum to bring the artist’s work to a new audience who can enjoy it in the town of his birth.”

Born in Greenock to Scots-Irish parents, in 1924 Scott moved with his mother to Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, to join his father in his native town. His father was a housepainter and sign-writer and was killed in an accident in 1927 while trying to save lives in a local fire. Scott was educated at the Model School and privately taught by Kathleen Bridle. He attended night classes in art at the Technical School, before he went to Belfast College of Art in 1928. He secured a place at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1931 and there won a silver medal and became a Landseer scholar in painting. In London he shared a flat with two Welshmen, Alfred Janes and Dylan Thomas.

He married in 1937 and lived abroad, mostly in Italy and France, where he co-founded an art school in Pont-Aven, Brittany. He abruptly returned to the UK in 1939 only days before the declaration of war. His sons, Robert and James, were born in 1940 and 1941. During the early years of World War II he worked at the Bath Art School, whose principal was Clifford Ellis. In 1942 he volunteered for the navy but was accepted for the army and after serving with a number of regiments he became attached to the Royal Engineers where he served until 1946 and learned lithography in the map-making section. In 1946 he returned to Pont Aven to recover his pre-war paintings and possessions but failed to find them. From 1946 until 1956 Scott was senior lecturer in painting at the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham Court.

In the summer of 1953 he visited the USA where he met Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. Scott was the first British artist of his generation to meet Rothko and become familiar with his work and together with a number of other artists, actively helped to make British museums aware of Rothko and the new American art scene. Although his work had become predominantly abstract in 1952, after his meeting with the American Abstract Expressionists, he revisited his roots in still life and European painting. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1958 and in 1959-1961 he executed a mural for the Altnagelvin Hospital, Derry. He died at his home near Bath, Somerset, in 1989, having suffered from Alzheimer’s for some years.

A major retrospective of his work was held at the Tate Gallery, London in 1972 and in 1986 in Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast. In 1998 a further retrospective was organised by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. In 2013 a major touring exhibition was held at Tate St Ives, the Hepworth Wakefield and the Ulster Museum, Belfast, to mark the centenary of Scott’s birth. Mounted in collaboration with the William Scott Foundation, this exhibition brought together works from major collections across the UK and Ireland, as well as important loans from public and private collections.