The summer of 1958 had done much for Scott’s reputation on the international stage, having been one of three artists selected to represent Britain at the XXIX Venice Biennale, showing twenty paintings alongside works by Kenneth Armitage and William Haytor. Besides gaining a new audience and a new sense of legitimacy and prestige, the artist’s time in Venice was memorable for Scott as a viewer, coming across the work of Jasper Johns for the first time, Scott’s appreciation of the American Abstract Expressionists had solidified following his visit to New York back in 1953, meeting Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko and ultimately contributing to the cross-cultural exchange that pushed Scott’s own work further towards abstraction. Indeed, Mark Rothko had stayed with the Scotts in Somerset in the summer of 1959.

By 1959, Scott’s work seemed to no longer rely on the austerity of his past still life compositions, instead, letting go of some of the intensity that had seemed somewhat integral to his artistic sensibilities around the same time he let abstraction overtake the figuration of his still life work. The present example is typical of the artist’s work in this period, there are still semblances of a table of still life objects but their forms are soft and ambiguous. The forms are further obscured by the lack of positive and negative space within a landscape of orange paint which allows the viewer easy access to the rich formal qualities within the pictorial space. Critical analysis of this more formalist approach saw Herbert Read describing Scott’s still life work as becoming more abstract but remaining abstractions ‘from a phenomenal object’, not expressions of ‘some extra-phenomenal ideal of harmony’, going on to focus on the inherent vitality that Scott’s work, old and new, exuded. Although reception was most often overwhelmingly positive, critics seemed to go to great lengths to distinguish Scott’s abstraction from other artists.