William Scott painted the present work around the same time as Seated Figure No.1. Aside from the figure’s ‘legs’, which in this version have been further simplified, the two paintings are virtually identical in both size and composition. It was not unusual for Scott to make another rendition of a work he was particularly pleased with, so that he could show the work more widely. The first version of the painting was exhibited three times in New York between 1954 and 1956, before it was sold to New York-based collector Guy A. Weill in 1957; meanwhile, this version featured in the 3rd International Art Exhibition that toured Japan in 1955. Seated Figure typifies Scott’s distinct painterly language in the period from 1951 to 1954, when he turned his attention from painting still lifes, landscape and figures to making ambiguous abstract works with rich, textural surfaces. Here, the painting’s image invites two readings – an abstract composition, and a seated figure with distorted, stick-like limbs, as alluded to by the work’s title. John Russell observed, ‘Nothing about it says: ‘’This is a human body.’’ Yet it spells out, irresistibly, the idea of a human body, and before long we cannot see it as anything else.’ 1

An invitation from the Arts Council to exhibit at the Festival of Britain in 1951 gave impetus to this change in direction in Scott’s work. As he explained, ‘I found that the forms I had been using would not easily expand, and I realised that another step towards simplification had to be made. This I did, not only in shape but in reducing my colour key. From then on, for three years, I made a series of paintings that contained practically no colour and a further reduction of multiple shapes. Pictures became more linear.’ 2 This trend towards abstraction united Scott with artists such as Roger Hilton, Victor Pasmore and Adrian Heath, and indeed the present work is remarkably comparable to a painting Hilton made the same year entitled Black on White, that Patrick Heron once described as ‘a Mondrian that is melting.’ 3

Upon inspection of the canvas surface, it appears that Scott created the present painting by first laying down an ochre and orange ground. When this had dried, he would have crudely delineated the figure in black paint, before applying white paint thickly, with loose, broad strokes, up to the edges of the black lines. Around these lines, hints of the coloured ground are still visible, imbuing what is otherwise a monochromatic painting with a subtle warmth. The expressive, unrefined manner in which Scott has executed this formal linear design emphasises the tactile, object-like quality of the painting.

1 Sarah Whitfield, William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings 1952 – 1959, Volume 2, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013, p100
2 Alan Bowness, William Scott: Paintings, Drawings and Gouaches, 1938 – 71, Tate Gallery, 1972, exh cat, pp69 – 70
3 S. Whitfield, 2013, Ibid, p100