William Scott's Victory 1945: A poignant memento of VE Day
This article originally appeared on Culture24.
The William Scott Foundation is marking the 70th anniversary VE Day with a beautiful early lithograph called Victory
William Scott, Victory, 1945© Estate of William Scott 2015Scott was back home while serving with the Royal Engineers, and his son remembers the occasion well.
“Our father came back on leave,” says Robert Scott, “and taking eggs from the few chickens we kept, he served us for breakfast boiled eggs in their shells painted in the red, white and blue of the Union Jack on VE day."
Today Robert, with his brother James, oversees his father's estate through the William Scott Foundation, which is highlighting one of their father’s more permanent artworks commemorating the momentous day.
Victory, a lithograph selected from the William Scott Archives for the 70th anniversary of VE Day, depicts William Scott and his wife Mary (or, perhaps, a typical couple) joyously flying on a white Dove of Peace.
Like many, Scott had good reason to celebrate the beginning of end of the war; he had volunteered to join the army in July 1942 and just a month later his younger brother Hughie, who was serving in the Royal Marines, was killed on board HMS Indomitable in ‘Operation Pedestal’, the Royal Navy’s costly mission to supply the besieged Allied stronghold of Malta.
Scott’s war service eventually saw him posted to the Royal Engineers, which took him to Wales, where from early 1944 he worked as a cartographer interpreting aerial photos taken by the RAF.
Artists were used for interpretation as they were able to abstract the essential elements needed to print aerial maps, using lithography, for the bombers to use the following night.
It was this experience that he used when making his own lithographic plates for prints, in particular the lithographs for a book called Soldiers’ Verse published in a series of books illustrated by contemporary artists for the publisher, Frederick Muller Ltd.
But unlike the desolate depictions of tanks, machinery and men that Scott conjured for the wartime book of soldier poetry, Victory is a buoyant work full of hope and light. It is, say the Foundation, the perfect "poignant memento of VE Day.”
Find out more about William Scott at williamscott.org/foundation
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