5-29 July 2017 FCB CADELL JD FERGUSSON GL HUNTER SJ PEPLOE
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6HZ 01315581200 | mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
FCB CADELL RSA, RSW (1883 - 1937) Cadell was twelve years younger than S.J. Peploe but was a precocious talentt through his school years at the Edinburgh Academy. He had a French mother, and was taken to France and Munich to finish his artistic education and some very fine, freely painted landscapes and interiors paintings date from this early period. Despite his sophistication, Cadell’s most natural habitat was the west Highlands, Iona in particular, and he made only a few painting trips to France after the war. He produced some of his most brilliant colourist works while staying with the Peploes in Cassis in 1924. Very fashionconscious, his work before 1914 had an Edwardian opulence and breadth unique in Scottish painting. By the twenties his work had a hard edge with clear colour, chiming with the Jazz Age; the compositions have a deco stylishness full of sophistication of concept and originality of palette.
Port Chan, Iona is a dramatic beach and favourite picnic site on the Atlantic side of Iona. In this small watercolour, Cadell captures the distinctive hebridean atmosphere so beloved of artists and visitors.
FCB Cadell Port Bhan, Iona watercolour, 12 x 17 cms signed lower right
Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, always known as Bunty, had a name that tells as much. He was usually dressed in his Campbell kilt and he enjoyed his kinship with the Duke of Argyll at Inveraray. As a private soldier, albeit in a Savile Row tailored uniform, he dined on one occasion at the Savoy with the Duke to the confusion of other officers present. His mother was French and the family spent much time on the continent including some months when Bunty studied in Munich. The Castle Gotha bears the artist’s early signature, FC de B Cadell and the date 1906 refers to a visit he made with his parents to the giant Saxe-Coburg palace. The lifelong influence of Arthur Melville is clearly visible in his approach.
FCB Cadell The Castle, Gotha, c.1906 watercolour, 18 x 28 cms signed lower right EXHIBITED FCB Cadell: Paintings &Works on Paper, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2011
JD FERGUSSON RBA (1874 - 1961) Born in Leith, J.D. Fergusson studied at the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh before travelling to Paris, where he was one of the first British artists to engage with French modernist painting, alongside S.J. Peploe. Fergusson spent most of his professional life in France and even in the last fifteen years of his life, when his base was in Glasgow, summers were spent with Margaret Morris’s summer dance school at Cap d’Antibes. Bohemian Paris was the ideal milieu for Fergusson and he had a huge circle of friends of many nationalities. He became a sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne and an exhibitor at the Salon des Indépendents. He had a major exhibition at the Doré Gallery in New Bond Street in London in 1914, where he was forced to return from Antibes at the outbreak of war. After a successful show in Paris in 1924 he took a studio at the Hôtel des Académies and divided his life between Paris and London until he and Meg moved to Glasgow in 1939. In 1931 he exhibited at Les Peintres Écossais exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, where his work La Déesse de la Rivière was purchased by the French government. In 1954 he was honoured with a travelling retrospective exhibition organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Pourville is a beach resort flanked by cliffs just south of Dieppe. As Green Beach it was one of the objectives in the Dieppe Raid of 1942 and saw heavy allied casualties. In early 20s it would have been a quiet village and a likely stop-over for Fergusson and Meg travelling from London to the South of France, perhaps scouting for an alternative venue for a Margaret Morris dance retreat. Fergusson’s vigorous wash drawings display a typical strong, modern structure while being true to place.
JD Fergusson Hills, Pourville, c.1922 watercolour, 33 x 27 cms EXHIBITED Annual Exhibition, St Andrews Fine Art, St Andrews, 1989, cat 62 Modern Masters VI, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017, cat. 5 PROVENANCE Private collection, Edinburgh
JD Fergusson Street, Pourville, c.1922 pencil & watercolour, 33 x 27 cms
JD Fergusson Luxembourg Gardens, 1905 conte drawing, 13.2 x 11.5 cms
La Petite Farandole was Fergusson and Meg’s home at Cap d’Antibes where they set up home together at the beginning of an extraordinary relationship which lastest until Fergusson’s death in 1961. Like Cadell, Fergusson never necglated watercolour as a medium, sometimes producing finnished works or using it for colour notes in sketch books.
JD Fergusson Still Life at La Petite Farandole Antibes, c.1913 conte and watercolour, 24.5 x 20.5 cms
JD Fergusson Profile of a Woman in a Pill Box Hat, 1909 conte, 20.9 x 13.4 cms
JD Fergusson The Game Keeper in Perthshire, Portrait of Fergusson’s Uncle in an Ulster Coat, c.1900 conte, 31.2 x 25 cms
By 1907 Fergusson had met and become involved with Anne Estelle Rice. She had come from Philadelphia to work as a fashion illustrator, but Fergusson persuaded her to become a painter. They were together until the autumn of 1913, when the relationship ended and she married the critic O. Raymond Drey and Fergusson began his lifelong relationship with Margaret Morris. From the summer of 1911, the art journal Rhythm was published, with Fergusson as art editor, a position he maintained for a year: Drey as one of the many young English literary contributors. The illustrations were selected for graphic strength, with artwork by Fergusson, Rice, Peploe, Picasso, Derain, Othon Friesz and many others in black and white.
JD Fergusson Anne Estelle Rice, Paris, 1907 conte, 20.2 x 10.6 cms
Fergusson was a prolific draftsman, seldom without a sketchbook. In the earliest period, his drawings with conte or pencil are delicate and depict domestic or street observations. In the studio he tended to work directly in oil and it is only when he was established in his first Paris studio from 1907 that the nude model became a regular subject. He worked quickly, changing the pose but rarely using any pentimenti, such was the confidence of his line. In the earlier Paris years he also made a prodigious quantity of on-the-spot café drawings, some quite ‘worked up’, and a selection was published in 1974 in a volume entitled Café Drawings in Edwardian Paris as a centenary tribute to Fergus, with an introduction by Margaret Morris. Nude, Paris is an outstanding drawing from this period. It is unusually large, drawn on a coloured sheet and is in charcoal and pastel. The subject is undoubtedly Anne Estelle Rice and was a gift to her, which accounts for the provenance by descent from her husband and son.
JD Fergusson Nude, Paris, 1912 charcoal and chalk, 36 x 23.7 cms PROVENANCE Anne Estelle Rice; O Raymond Drey, Manchester; David Drey Esq, Withington House, Manchester
JD Fergusson Emma, Paris, 1907 conte and coloured chalks, 15 x 12 cms
JD Fergusson Janice, London, 1918, II conte, 25.5 x 20.2 cms
JD Fergusson Margaret Morris, London, c.1918 conte, 17.5 x 11.43 cms
JD Fergusson Self Portrait, 1909-11 conte, 20.9 x 13.4 cms
JD Fergusson La Parisienne conte, 18.75 x 11.25 cms
JD Fergusson Girl, 1925-30 conte, 25 x 20 cms EXHIBITED The Scottish Colousits, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016 Fergusson’s Women, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2011
GL HUNTER (1877 - 1931) Born in Rothesay in 1877, George Leslie Hunter emigrated to California in 1892, where his father bought a farm. He spent all his time drawing and when his family came back in 1900 he stayed to enjoy the bohemian lifestyle of San Francisco, referred to by his future biographer TJ Honeyman as montparnasse with six-shooters. He earned money through illustration work for newspapers and magazines. He travelled with friends to New York and Paris on 1904, working in each city for a few months. Back in San Francisco he lost everything in the 1906 earthquake and shortly thereafter returned permanently to Scotland. He had his first solo exhibition with Alexander Reid in Glasgow in 1915, an association that continued until his death in 1931. From 1923 he exhibited with Peploe and Cadell as the Three Scottish Colourists and he spent much of the twenties in France, often subsidised by Reid and Lefevre and a coterie of dedicated collectors.
Hunter spent much of the late twenties in the South of France, sometimes based at Saint Paul de Vence, but also visiting Antibes, Cassis, Villefranche and Juan-les-Pins. While his dealer, Dr T.J. Honeyman, then a partner in the firm of Reid & Lefevre, waited for news of painting success to fulfil a longstanding commitment to a one-man show, his output was in large restricted to pen and crayon drawings, like our example. It was a practical medium in which he could work quickly in front of the subject, here capturing a carriage passing by a lush palm tree on a bright, fresh Mediterranean day.
GL Hunter Juan-Les-Pins, c.1928 ink and crayon, 30 x 37 cms. PROVENANCE Alexander Reid & Lefevre, London
SJ PEPLOE RSA (1871 - 1935) Born in 1871, S.J. Peploe is the senior of the four Scottish Colourists. Peploe had his first exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in 1903 and a lifelong association with us until his untimely death in 1935. He lived in Paris from 1910 until 1912, where his work changed radically, from paintings reminiscent of Manet and Sargent to brilliant Fauvist works that placed him in the vanguard of British modernism. By the time of his death aged sixty-four in 1935, he was recognised as a great painter, but only by a small number of collectors and curators, like Ion Harrison, T.J. Honeyman, Jack Blyth and Stanley Cursiter. His reputation today is secure and growing in some part thanks to the strength of the marketplace where The Scottish Gallery has been a consistent advocate under the leadership of Guy Peploe whose biography was first published in 2000.
SJ Peploe Model Lying Down, c.1907 sanguine, 21.25 x 27.75 cms
SJ Peploe Lady with the Dark Eyes, c.1930 conte drawing, 21 x 18 cms
Mother and child depicts Margaret Peploe and her first child Willy. He was born in Royan in August 1910 so we can assume that the drawing is made back in Paris, in the tiny studio apartment at 278 Ble Raspail. The drawing is characteristic of a number of interiors and street scenes of Paris made with thinned oil paint and conte crayon. Others describe a flower market or street scenes with gendarmes, priests and passersby, all are swift, deft and form a charming record of a happy time for the Peploe family and the artist.
SJ Peploe Mother and Child, 1910 conte drawing and oil on paper, 20.5 x 15.5 cms