William Walton's Scapino: A Comedy Overture took as its inspiration a series of engravings from 1622 by Jacques Callot of the Balli di sfessania—specifically Callot's depiction of the jaunty and mischievous Scapino, a character related to those of the commedia dell'arte. This was not the first time Walton had been inspired by a scene from the visual arts; his Portsmouth Point Overture, a work for orchestra composed in 1925 when the composer was 23, emerged as a musical reflection on a famous caricature by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) of the busy docks of Portsmouth. In that earlier work, as in the Scapino Overture, Walton's score stands as more of a character study than a pictorialization; furthermore, by the time he composed Scapino, Walton's sense of expressive balance had been refined and his orchestrational and figurational palette had been expanded, resulting in a work with the same kind of energy and programmatic engagement as the Portsmouth Point Overture, but one whose contrasting sections and structural play form a more cohesive musical character.

Callot's Scapino, the hero of Molière's Les Fourberies de Scapin and a perhaps a distant cousin to the Figaro character archetype, is a kind of henchman or servant—a sneaky sidekick to the commedia's more familiar Harlequin. His role was to arrange for his master's amorous adventures—in fact, as several writers have observed, his name suggests an etymological connection to the word "escapade." In commenting on Walton's musical realization of the character, scholar David Drew describes Scapino as "something between Leporello and Till Eulenspiegel." Certainly, his meddling mirth finds voice in the opening gesture of the piece, a rather saucy trumpet fanfare made of dotted rhythms and melodic leaps, set against snickeringly dissonant staccato chords in the strings. His role as romantic go-between is expressed by the stepwise melodic contours and espressivo articulation of a subsequent theme, given over to the viola and English horn. Such recombinations of moods characterize the rest of the piece—giocoso dotted figures appear intermittently, most prominently in ostentatious brass exclamations, while at one point the second theme from the beginning (heard originally in the viola and English horn) is stretched durationally and rendered with guitar-like strummings in the strings, who are instructed to play their parts come una serenata ("As a serenade").

Scapino was composed on commission from Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony on the occasion of the group's 50th anniversary, and received its world premiere by that ensemble, conducted by Stock, in 1941. As it originally appeared, the score called for triple winds and a brass section augmented by coronets. Walton later withdrew this arrangement, and in 1951 published the version for standard orchestral forces that appears on programs and recordings today.

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