In 1964, the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation invited Alan Bowness, then senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, Lilian Somerville, Director, Fine Art Department of the British Council, and Norman Reid, Director of the Tate Gallery, to make a collection of recent British Art. It was in this capacity that Bowness wrote to Scott on 16 September 1965, saying, I've been meaning to write to you for months to ask about available major oils for Stuyvesant, as I think it's time we bought another and it ought probably to be an early one. (Justin is very keen on Nearing Circling I think).' The title 'Nearing Circles' is near enough to Circles Diminishing for that to be the work in question. (`Justin was Justin Knowles, then working for Peter Stuyvesant in public relations and, according to Alan Bowness, the driving force behind the collection' (ed. Sarah Whitfield, William Scott, Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings 1960-1968, Volume 3, Thames and Hudson, London, 2013, cat no.475, illus colour p80)

Circles Diminishing was painted before May 1961 when it was included in the Hanover Gallery exhibition. There it attracted the attention of the critic Pierre Rouve who saw in `the unspoiled immediacy of the handwriting and the recurrent honesty of the colour' of Scott's recent paintings a close connection with the art of Roger Hilton.

`Their world,' Rouve Wrote,' is not the rarefied atmosphere of formal permutations, it is the domain of man aware of his earthly nobility. That is why there is such a heavy load of unadulterated directness in Circles diminishing' (ibid. p80)

Scott's paintings from 1960 and 1961 have been described by the critic John Russell as representing a high point in his career. Circles Diminishing was one of 28 works exhibited at the Hanover Gallery in 1961. This was Scott’s first one man show at the gallery since 1956 and much had taken place in the interceding years. In 1958 Scott exhibited works at the Venice Biennale and his success there placed him more than ever on the international stage. The following year saw solo shows at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, shows in Turin, Milan and at the Galerie Charles Lienhard in Zurich. In 1960, the art society of Hanover, the Kestner-Gesellschaft organised a large touring exhibition.

As Norbert Lynton has summarised, ‘From the time of Venice on, Scott’s work was seen and given critical consideration in European exhibitions, as well as further afield, as an unmissable element in contemporary art (Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames & Hudson, London, 2007, p206)

By the 1961 exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, Scott had reached a critical point in his career. In the forward of the exhibition catalogue, Russell writes that the artist has appeared to have made a significant stylistic leap, ‘The taut near-geometrical structure of his earliest abstract paintings has given way to something altogether broader, looser, and more improvisatory in appearance; but whether the surface be pocked or smudged or, by contrast, of an ingratiating smoothness and sweetness, Scott is still Scott; and these pictures, taken singly or as an ensemble, are something for him and for us to rejoice in.’

Whilst these new paintings presented a stylistic change, Scott's fundamental concerns with proportion, division of space and relations of tone, remained paramount. Scott no longer explicitly described the pots, pans and kitchen table of his earlier still life paintings, but these new abstract forms were clearly derived from them. These simpler, abstract forms were liberated from their original referents, but rather than reducing their meaning, they became imbued with other qualities. As Robert Melville suggests, ‘His naughts are rich. They are filled with his own participation and reverberate with the laughter and shouts of children: one might even describe them as significant forms.' (Robert Melville, William Scott, Motif 8, 1961)

These simpler images, made with a more emphatic, painterly technique, foregrounded the process of painting itself and the subjective 'void', left by Scott's break with figuration, was partly filled by an increased sense of the artist's role in the finished work. Here the unfinished surface and undisguised brushstrokes recall the physical act of painting and the imperfect circles that are scrawled onto the canvases surface imbue the artwork with a palpable sense of the painter at work.

The approach to scale in this painting, as with others from this period, reveals a move away from the easel-tradition towards that of the mural. In the same year Scott painted Circles Diminishing, he also completed his mural commission for the Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, a major public project and the first time that he had worked on such a scale. The process of working on this commission is visually translated into his smaller paintings of the same time. In Circles Diminishing Scott plays with scale, the diminishing circles emphasize the vast area of blue, and the pared down tonal values create monumental spaces within the canvas.

Circles Diminishing was formerly part of the Peter Stuyvesant Collection, one of Europe’s most highly regarded corporate art collections. The collection originated in the late 1950s when Alexander Orlow, managing director of Turmac Tobacco, which made the popular Peter Stuyvesant brand of cigarettes in its factory in Zevenaar, Holland, decided his workforce needed something to cheer them up. “However complicated the operations of a machine may look, it soon becomes monotonous to a factory worker,” he said.

In 2000, Turmac was bought by the British American Tobacco Company (BAT), and the art collection was renamed the BAT Artventure collection.