The Scottish Gallery Spring Collection
The Scottish Gallery Spring Collection 4 April – 2 May 2012 Private View Tuesday 3 April 2012 6.30 - 8.30pm Works are for sale on receipt of this invitation Exhibitions can be viewed online www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/springcollection
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ Tel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk Web www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Front cover: FCB Cadell Stll Life, Tulips c.1922 oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms
JD Fergusson, RBA (1874-1961) Margaret and Willy Peploe at Hotel Panorama, Cassis, 1913 oil on canvas, 61 x 56.5 cms signed verso Provenance: Gifted to Margaret Peploe by the artist
In August 1913 Fergusson was in Cassis with his partner Anne Estelle Rice accompanying SJ Peploe, his wife Margaret and their son Willy (fig 1). It was both artists’ first visit to the South of France and their choice of the small fishing village near Marseilles may well have been made in the light of the many French painters who had worked there before, including Paul Signac. It was Fergusson who recalled persuading Peploe to accompany him; at first he thought it would be too hot for ‘Bill’ but on seeing a poster with the name ‘Casssis’ on it near his Paris Studio. Fergusson recalled in 1945 in his Memories of Peploe: “He decided to take the risk. We arrived to find it quite cool and Bill didn’t suffer at all. We had his (third) birthday there and after a lot of consideration chose a bottle of Chateau Lafite instead of champagne. Lafite now always means to me that happy lunch on the verandah overlooking Cassis bay, sparkling in the sunshine.” As in Royan three years before both painters worked on chiefly on panel although Fergusson did several canvasses and both made many sketches, particularly of the harbour and its traffic of schooners. It may have been a difficult time for Fergusson and Rice who were to separate shortly; Fergusson had already met Margaret Morris who he had met in the spring when she had brought a troupe of her dancers to Paris to perform at the Marigny Theatre. Fergusson, whose Paris studio had been demolished in the spring, decided to stay in the south and by Christmas he was renting a little house at Cap d’Antibes where he persuaded Morris to join him and where they spent the summer of the next year before the outbreak of War forced their return to London.
The group stayed in the Hotel Panorama, which forms the backdrop to the portrait with its distinctive round pediment on the faรงade and screened verandah below. The same view was painted by Peploe (fig 2) when he returned with Willy, Denis and Margaret in 1924. At this time Fergusson is seeking more structure in his compositions and there seems apparent a simplification of the motif which recalls the later Cezanne. The application of the paint is in short, directional brush marks and the palette also restrained. He moved to the south seeking more light and colour and the limited palette may well be a misty day which often heralds the autumnal mistral. While the effect is somewhat severe and modernist he has at the same time captured the calm strength of his subject with her young child, confident in motherhood.
Fig 1. Anne Estelle Rice, Margaret and Willy Peploe and JD Fergusson at Cassis, 1913
Fig 2. SJ Peploe, The Aloe Tree, c.1924, Manchester City Art Galleries
JD Fergusson, RBA (1874-1961) Figures on the Beach, c.1914 mixed media, 23 x 28 cms Provenance: Private Collection, Edinburgh
This charming drawing by JD Fergusson was almost certainly made during Fergusson’s stay at the Cap d’Antibes in 1914, a quiet fishing village between Cannes and Nice. Fergusson moved here in 1913 while his studio in Paris was being prepared, no doubt following the example set by Fauvist and Expressionist artists who had travelled to the South of France in search of bright colour and light. He took small villa called La Petite Farandole. The weather, food and wine suited Fergusson tremendously. His letters to the dancer Margaret Morris, whom he had just met that year, convey a deep contentment of his time there; “The place here has given me quite a new start, a different feeling altogether about painting... The light that one snatched with excitement when it happened once in a blue moon, is here even in winter”. However his idyllic time in Cap d’Antibes was cut short by the outbreak of war, when circumstance forced a move back to London. Fergusson uses charcoal and wash to capture the moment in front of him, three figures collecting cockles in a basket. The long shadows cast behind the figures, rendered with quick flurries of charcoal signify the time of day to be early evening, as the sun casts a warm glow across the landscape. A fishing boat lulls on the horizon, underneath a sky punctuated by heavy white cloud.
FCB Cadell, RSA, RSW (1883-1937) Still Life, Tulips, c.1922 oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cms signed lower right Provenance: Acquired by SJ Peploe Exhibited: The Royal Scottish Academy, Festival Exhibition, 1949 Literature: Illustrated in Tom Hewlett and Duncan Macmillan, F.C.B. Cadell, Lund Humphries, London, 2011 (p.168)
From 1920 Cadell’s approach to still lifes changed dramatically. Before his Edinburgh studio paintings had benefitted from a loose handling of paint, focusing on the qualities of light on different surfaces, akin to his landscape painting in Iona. However his new interior scenes and still lifes had a new emphasis on sharp drawing and juxtaposition of form to create heavily structured compositions. Although these paintings take influence from Japanese art particularly in their closely cropped perspectives; there is also comparison to be made with Les Nabis in Cadell’s simplification of form into blocks of saturated colour. Les Nabis were a group of artists working in the 1890s which included Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard. They abandoned linear perspective in favour of large planes of bright colour, admiring forms purely for decorative qualities. The tulips are painted in yellow and their form flattened to become almost abstract, geometric shapes so that the painting may be read as a design or pattern. This is accentuated by the red vermillion tabletop, cut dramatically by the angular form of the blue and yellow tablecloth. The painting was probably a gift to SJ Peploe during the artist’s lifetime and was lent by Margaret Peploe to The Royal Scottish Academy’s Festival Exhibition in 1949.
John Maclauchlan Milne, RSA (1879-1957) Continental, 1924 oil on board, 37.5 x 45 cms signed and dated lower right
Milne is often referred to as the fifth Scottish Colourist and indeed his work and life have strong connections to his better known contemporaries. Like Fergusson he enjoyed a long, productive life and his many paintings of the hills and harbours of Arran, where he moved at the outset of the War are a distinct and important legacy. It is his French work, however, which makes the clear link with Peploe, Hunter and Cadell. He married a Frenchwoman and lived for some time at Lavardin (Loir et Cher) famed as one of the most beautiful villages in France but it is his Paris scenes made in the twenties and his many visits to the south which produced his best paintings. He was in Cassis in 1924 at the same time as Peploe and Cadell and travelled along the coast as far as St Raphael. Our picture bears a label firm the firm of T and R Annan who flourished in Glasgow in the fifties and sixties which titles the work: Continental (in the hand of Craigie Annan) and we can suppose they sold it after the painter’s death in 1957, otherwise they might have researched the location! It is without question the South of France and it is the artist at his most ‘colourist’. The painter seems to have sat on a harbour-front looking back at the awnings of a few shops and looking into a jumble of gables and roofs, reflected light and shadow masterfully rendered, towards a rustic tower which divides two masses of intense blue sky. It is at once complex and satisfying as a composition and the perfect example of a northern painter finding his Fauvist instinct in the brilliant light of the Riviera.
George Leslie Hunter (1879-1931) Villefranche, c.1927 ink and crayon, 30 x 40 cms signed lower right Ex Collection: William Bowie
Hunter produced much more on paper in the last ten years of his life than in oil. He was leading a peripatetic life moving from the South of France to London and Scotland in search of inspiration and the practicalities favoured drawing and watercolour. Hunter worked in Nice, Antibes and here in Villefranche and these vigorous and spontaneous drawings with crayon or watercolour are some of the most vivid, successful works of the artist’s maturity. His energetic pen drawing animates the subject while washes of orange crayon capture the heat and sunshine of a French summer.
Sir William Gillies, CBE, RA, RSA, PPRSW (1898-1973) Rocks, Morar, c.1933 watercolour, 36.5 x 55.5 cms signed lower right and signed and titled verso Provenance: Private collection, Aberfeldy; Private collection, South Queensferry Exhibited: The Scottish Arts Council Gillies Retrospective, Royal Scottish Academy, 1970; Centenary Gillies Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, 1998 (cat. no. 121); Sir William Gillies Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, April 2003 (cat. no. 12)
This striking painting of Morar, situated just south of Mallaig on the West Coast of Scotland was painted on a trip to the area around 1933. Gillies travelled extensively around Scotland during his holidays from Edinburgh College of Art, often accompanied by his sister and good friend, fellow painter John Maxwell. He made many studies of Morar beach, where he revelled in the dramatic contrast between black rock and white sand. Painted outside (and in all weather conditions!), watercolours from this period tend to focus on fleeting atmospheric effects; Gillies striving to capture the quick changes in light and movement in his surroundings. The dark cloud hangs over the painting ominously, mimicking the form of dark rocks in the foreground. The use of such heavy contrast in this painting is unusual in Gillies’s oeuvre. It makes for an evocative yet extremely stylish painting, playing on the juxtaposition of features in the Highland landscape; where smooth sea meets dark, jagged rock. This painting was included in the major retrospective on the artist organised by the Scottish Arts Council at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1970.
The Earl Haig (1918-2009) March Day, c.1948 oil on board, 33 x 41 cms initialled lower right Exhibited: The Scottish Gallery, Lord Haig Exhibition, 1949; The Scottish Arts Council, Scottish Paintings from the Collection of Dr. R.A. Lillie, 1969 Provenance: Dr R.A. Lillie
This small painting dating from the late 1940s depicts Earl Haig’s favourite subject; the Scottish Borders. His scene is of a blustery spring day, an old farmer’s cart is parked abandoned at the edge of a field, as daffodils sprout up between its wheels. Haig deconstructs his landscape into simplified forms, transforming the scene in front of him into a lyrical composition; in which the artist’s love and joy for the landscape is clear to see. Haig had the distinction of having the longest professional relationship with The Scottish Gallery of any artist, first showing in 1945 and enjoying fifteen shows during his lifetime. His evocative landscape paintings have assured his place as one of the most committed and vivid painters of his generation. This particular work was purchased by Dr. Robert A. Lillie, the great patron of Scottish art, from Haig’s second show at The Scottish Gallery in 1949. It was then exhibited at The Scottish Arts Council as part of Dr. Lillie’s collection in 1969.
Sylvia Wishart, RSA (1936-2008) Lewis, 1960 watercolour, 47 x 51 cms signed, dated and titled lower left Provenance: Private Collection
Sylvia Wishart today seems pre-eminent in a group of painters associated with the North-East of Scotland which includes Ian Fleming, Frances Walker and Robert-Henderson Blyth. The recent retrospective organized by the Pier Art Centre in Stromness, Orkney which travelled in part to the RSA earlier this year has introduced her to a much wider audience who can appreciate her restraint, subtle mark-making and perfectly rendered sense of ‘place.’ Her work bears comparison and makes an important bridge between Joan Eardley and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, two apparently very different, towering figures in post War Scottish painting. It is the restraint which seems remarkable. Her subtle wash of watercolour is pure atmosphere and drawing minimal. The half-bare trees, stark optimism of the white chimney stack of the farmhouse and march of the telegraph poles over the horizon and beautifully observed and perfectly sufficient to take us to the place and even the day.
John Houston, OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI (1930-2008) Still Life, c.1980 oil on canvas, 41 x 51 cms signed lower left
John Houston had his first show at The Scottish Gallery in 1960. His second outing was for the Edinburgh Festival in 1962 when he replaced Gillies who postponed his own show until the following year; it was a commercial and critical triumph which launched his career and made his reputation. He sold over 100 works at the exhibition, a performance he was to repeat with his Festival show with us in 2003. Though he is perhaps best known for his expressive landscapes, John loved still life and in the 1970s produced many rose and poppy pieces, often with dark backgrounds, in richly worked oil paint and strong colour.
Denis Peploe, RSA (1914-1993) Still Life with Flowers, c.1975 oil on canvas, 61 x 48 cms signed lower right
In his earliest still life Peploe tended to rely on a conventional space which seems to sit in a tradition going back to Cezanne and indeed to his father SJ Peploe. By the 1950s he abandons this in favour of an abstract or even exterior backdrop and allows his still life objects to ‘float’ in front. This is a practice he had in common with other painters of the Edinburgh School such as John Maxwell, William MacTaggart and apparent in the later work of Anne Redpath. Still Life with Flowers is painted with a palette-knife and the marks make it possible to read the picture’s abstract quality as foremost.
Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with their exhibition Spring Collection 4 April – 2 May 2012 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/springcollection ISBN 978-1-905146-64-2 Designed by www.kennethgray.co.uk Photography by William van Esland Photography Printed by J Thomson Colour Printers All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.