William Scott was born in Scotland in 1913. He shortly afterward moved to Northern Ireland with his family, where he began his artistic education with Kathleen Bridle, a local art teacher. He went on to study at the Belfast School of Art, and then later at the Royal Academy in London, where he initially studied sculpture before switching to painting.

After his graduation, he and his wife Mary Lucas, who he had met in art school, moved to France to open an art school with Geoffrey Nelson, a fellow painter. This school allowed Scott to pursue his artistic career in France while also focusing on teaching, a lifelong passion of his. During this time, Scott began to achieve artistic success, displaying his paintings–at this point, primarily still lifes–at the Paris Salon d’Automne.

At the start of World War II, Scott and Lucas moved back to Britain, where Scott enlisted in the army. In the army, Scott served in the Royal Engineers as a lithographic draftsman, putting his art skills to patriotic use. Following the war, Scott went to teach at the Bath Academy of Art. During this period, his success continued to grow, with multiple solo exhibitions, as did his network of other important artists. He was closely tied to the St. Ives Group of artists and also built friendships with abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. It was during this period when Scott first began experimenting with abstraction in his works.

As he continued to gain success, he left his position at the Bath Academy of Art and painted full time. He represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennale, where he won the prestigious Sanbra Purchase Prize. In the 1960s, Scott traveled the world with his art, exhibiting throughout Europe and Asia and doing a yearlong residency in Berlin. He lectured for the British Council in Australia, Mexico and India. His work also received great acclaim within Britain, with a retrospective exhibit at the Tate in 1972, which showed 135 of his works and many other major exhibitions. In addition, he was conferred honorary doctorates from Trinity College Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast, and the Royal College of Art in London, as well as being elected to the Royal Academy.

This piece is an important demonstration of the major art themes of Scott’s life, showing his still lifes on their slide into abstraction, containing both abstract and representational elements. The objects, while still recognizable, are flattened, and seem almost to hang off a horizon line rather than sit on a table. Scott’s subtlety in his blending of colors creates vibrance in an otherwise stiff composition, retaining the mood of his earlier still lifes.

Margaret Roper (1505-1544) was the eldest and favorite daughter of Sir Thomas More. Extremely well educated for a woman of her time, she was particularly well-known for her knowledge of Latin and Greek. Her translation into English of Precatio Dominica by the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, a close family friend, was one of the earliest translations ever published by a British woman, and was very well-received. She was her father’s closest confidante in his later years, and his writings about her make it clear that he saw her as an intellectual equal. After his execution in 1535 for his refusal to accept Henry VIII’s departure from Catholicism, she and her lawyer husband, William Roper, were the people who ensured that his story did not die with him. Along with rescuing and preserving his head, Margaret carefully collected and protected More’s writings, particularly his letters from prison. Her diligence ensured the survival of the narrative of More’s martyrdom, likely leading to his eventual sainthood, conferred in 1933.

This portrait is a copy by a well-trained artist of part of an original portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein, often seen as the greatest portrait painter of his generation, first came to England in 1526 with a letter of recommendation to Sir Thomas More from Erasmus, who he had painted previously. Along with painting his now-famous portrait of More, Holbein also painted a group portrait of More with his family. This painting was destroyed by a fire in the 18th century, and now survives only through copies. Copying paintings was a common practice in the 16th century, and Holbein’s works were in high demand. His portraits were extremely popular during his lifetime, and after he died, no other portrait painters initially stepped up to take his place. As a result, the market for copies of his portraits boomed in the century after his death, as collectors clamored for Holbeins of their own. The majority of these were created within a century of his death, a fact backed up for several pieces by dendrochronology. Research even suggests that many copies were created using Holbein’s own drawings and patterns, which had come into the possession of Henry VIII following Holbein’s death.  

This portrait is most likely one of those early copies. There was evidently some desire to own portraits of Margaret, since multiple portraits of her alone copied from Holbein’s Sir Thomas More with his Family and Household are extant, including one in the National Trust in Knole, Kent. This was likely due to her influential status and fame as a model woman of letters. This painting is generally consistent with the other surviving copies; however, Roper’s bodice is here depicted as solid black and does not include a red panel as in other versions. The details of her costume are carefully rendered, with layers of mordant creating a low relief forming the gold decorations and chains in her garments. This painting includes Margaret Roper’s arms, which consist of her husband’s impaling her own, made up of Thomas More’s quartering her mother’s.

Hisao Domoto was born in Kyoto to a family of artists. His uncle, Insho Domoto, was a well-respected member of the Japanese art scene, known for his works in the traditional Japanese Nihonga style, particularly his temple screens. Domoto began his art education by studying Nihonga painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. He achieved early critical success while still in school there, exhibiting at the Japan Fine Arts Exhibition, where his work was met with high acclaim. In 1952, he traveled to Paris to study oil painting. He soon became associated with the Art Informel movement, which was flourishing in Europe at the time with its spontaneous abstractions and focus on breaking artistic tradition. He achieved great success in this style, staging his first solo exhibition in 1957 and winning prestigious awards such as the Lissone International Art Exhibition Award.

Edward Steichen was one of the fathers of American photography, both artistic and commercial. Born in Luxembourg, Steichen’s family immigrated to the United States when he was two years old. Eventually, the family ended up in Milwaukee, where the young Steichen was an apprentice with a lithographic firm. He soon turned his interests to painting and photography, deciding in 1900 to travel to Paris to study and immerse himself in art. He stopped in New York on his way to Europe, where he sought out Alfred Stieglitz, the vice-president of the Camera Club of New York and a leading figure in American art photography. Stieglitz was impressed with his work and bought several pieces. The two created the basis for what would become a long and productive working relationship before Steichen left for Europe.

Steichen spent two years in Paris, during which he shifted his interests almost entirely to photography, learning new cutting-edge methods for taking and developing photographs. During this time, Steichen made his mark as a portrait photographer, but he was also exposed to the French art scene. When Steichen returned to the US, he immediately rose to the top of the art photography scene. He joined Stieglitz’s new group, the Photo-Secession, through which many of his photographs were published and his work was displayed in many exhibitions. His photography style at this time was painterly, fitting perfectly the Photo-Secession’s goal of establishing photography as a fine art. He returned to Paris in 1907, where he continued to learn new photographic techniques, but also was active in the art scene, fostering friendships with artists such as Auguste Rodin.

When World War I began, Steichen was quick to volunteer. During the war, Steichen worked taking photographs from planes, furthering his already developing interest in the technical side of photography. In his early art photographs, he had striven towards a soft and foggy style, sometimes even kicking his camera stand while taking photographs to achieve a blurred effect. During the war, however, he had to learn to do the opposite, trying to take the clearest photographs possible from the unsteady surface of an airplane. He had to add a new level of technicality to his photography, and this technicality is something that stuck with him after the war, shifting his style to be much clearer and more realistic. The war had another major effect on Steichen’s life: it effectively ended his friendship with Stieglitz, who did not share Steichen’s fervent patriotism and retained some loyalty to Germany, his home country. This was the last nail in the coffin for their already strained relationship: Stieglitz resented Steichen’s growing interest in commercial photography, which Stieglitz saw as a betrayal of the artistic ideals they had shared in the Photo-Secession, a group which Steichen, in turn, felt that was increasingly a self-centered project for Stieglitz.

After the war, Steichen turned his interests almost entirely to commercial photography. He did advertising photography and magazine spreads, taking portraits of the most famous and important people at the time for publications such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. He became hugely successful, defining the stars of the generation through his characteristic portraiture and innovating fields such as fashion and advertising photography. While he claimed to be past his former artistic aspirations, his artistic background clearly helped him to look at things differently and create new standards for photography. His studio drew important and famous clients until he closed it in 1938. After the closing of his studio, he went on to be a lieutenant commander for the U.S. Navy during World War II, documenting the war in the Pacific theater. He then went on to be a curator of photography for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, eventually becoming the head of that department, making a triumphant return to the art world to round out his career.