In his art, William Scott (1913-1989) departed from the mainstream styles of his contemporaries. He rejected the 19th-century ideas of many of the followers of the artists William Blake (1757-1827) and Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) who emerged in the 1930s. Scott aimed at simpler images that concentrated on space and proportion rather than on detailed representation. He became greatly influenced by contemporary American artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko By 1960 he was purely interested in shapes and colours, as is evident in this watercolour.
