Cornish Harbour, Mousehole, 1955

<p>William Scott was a British artist born in Greenock. In 1928 he attended the Belfast School of Art before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy school in 1931, initially studying sculpture, he subsequently moved to the painting department. Scott spent a number of years living and working in France and Italy before the outbreak of the Second World War where he served with the Royal Ordinance Survey and learned lithography with the Royal Engineers. His career as an exhibiting artist took him across the world, meeting the Abstract Expressionists in New York in the early 1950s and representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1958. His work sits between abstraction and figuration – rooted in the European tradition, with themes of landscape, still life and the female nude. </p> <p>His work is held in public collections in the United Kingdom and Ireland as well as the United States of America.</p>