William McCanceContemplative Figure1945

From 1933, McCance began producing red clay figures; their heavy, curved limbs parallelling contemporaries including Henry Moore and Frank Dobson. These sculptures feature repeatedly throughout McCance’s still life paintings of the 1940s, as in the example here, which comes originally from the artist’s estate.

At first glance depicting a sculpture resting on a coverlet, with rocks and driftwood, the work dualistically reads as a slumbering giant, nestled in the foothills of a mountain besides a winding river.

McCance is often described as Scotland’s only true modernist of the early 20th century.

Born in Glasgow and student at the Glasgow School of Art (1911-1915), McCance moved to London in 1920 with his first wife Agnes Miller Parker, a talented artist and designer in her own right. It was there they became acquainted with Percy Wyndham-Lewis and the Vorticists, who were the British answer to stylistic developments on the continent, including Cubism and Futurism. Within this movement, the human form became mechanised, in reaction to both the horrors and advances of War. The landscape and domestic objects too, were reduced to solid geometric volumes.

McCance worked across painting, printmaking, design, sculpture, writing and typography, incorporating these avant-garde tendencies across his oeuvre.