William Scott OBE RA
1913-1989

Born in Greenock, Scotland in 1913, William Scott and his family returned to their native Enniskillen in 1924.  He enrolled at the Belfast College of Art in 1928 and later won a scholarship to continue his studies at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where he specialised in sculpture and painting.  In 1936 Scott spent some time in Cornwall and London, before marrying fellow artist Mary Lucas.  The Scotts then lived in Italy and the South of France and spent summers at the artist’s colony at Pont Aven from 1937 to 1939, until the outbreak of war when they decided to return to England.  Scott joined the army and studied lithography in the map-making section of the Royal Engineers in North Wales.  During this time he contributed for the first time to the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, Dublin.  After the war, Scott became senior painting master at the Bath Academy of Arts. 

In 1950 he showed a small retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.  In 1953 he travelled to the US where he met Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline through his future US dealer Martha Jackson.  From 1953-1971, he held nine solo shows at the Hanover Gallery London.  In 1953 and 1961 he exhibited at the important Sao Paulo Bienals and also represented Britain at the Venice Biennales of 1954 and 1958.  Scott was awarded an OBE in 1966. To date two retrospectives of his work have been held - one at the Kunsthalle, Berne in 1963 which toured to the Ulster Museum and a second at the Tate Gallery, London in 1972.  He was chosen to represent Ireland in Rosc ‘80.  Selected collections include the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, London, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kunsthalle, Hamburg, the Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna, Rome, the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée National D’Art Moderne, Paris