S.J. Peploe's Studio Life at 150 | October 2021 | The Scottish Gallery by The Scottish Gallery

S. J. Peploe’s Studio Life at 150

S. J. Peploe’s Studio Life at 150 30 September – 23 October 2021

S. J. Peploe’s Studio Life at 150 Foreword 5 The Studio Life 6 Still Life 18 The Models 34 The Colourist 52 The Landscape 74 Drawing 86 Legacy 110

The Raeburn Studio, 32 York Place, Edinburgh 3

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Foreword S. J. Peploe (1871–1935)

Today the qualities of Samuel John Peploe: the early achievements, the timelessness of his mature oeuvre, the seriousness of his quest for the masterpiece, the direct expressionist appeal of his first modernist pictures, the subtle delivery of his emotionally laden palette, all identify a significant contributor to our cultural history; he is one of our greatest painters. To mark the passage of 150 years since the birth of S. J. Peploe we thought that a particular, more personal exhibition and publication would make a new contribution to his memory. His chronology is well-established, as is his transformation from a daring Edwardian portraitist and Impressionist landscape painter, into Scotland’s first Modernist. A fix on his chronology is derived from his studios, the creative loci which contributed to significant developments in his painting from the mid-nineties until his death in 1935. Each studio therefore receives prominence in a new illustrated chronology.

There follow several sections; firstly, Still Life, his best known and most successful subject, again chronologically ordered allowing insights into his mind and technical development at key moments. Then we look at his models, his paintings of Jeannie Blyth, Peggy Macrae and his wife Margaret. In a chapter called The Colourist we look at the brilliant Fauvist panels he made from 1907 to 1912, focussing in particular on Royan which leads to our chapter: Landscape, which became his main subject in his later career. Finally, we look at Drawing, vitally important to the artist in every phase, which is celebrated with a group of previously unseen works. We have borrowed several of Peploe’s greatest works and are enormously grateful to the owners for their generosity. Otherwise, thanks must be dispersed close to home: to the creative work of The Gallery and input from many professionals, curators and academics. Guy Peploe The Scottish Gallery

Self Portrait, c.1900 oil on canvas, 51 x 56 cm signed lower left Exhibited: S. J. Peploe, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2012 Provenance: Private collection, Edinburgh 5

S. J. Peploe in his Devon Place studio, c.1902–1904 6

The Studio Life

“My memories of S. J. Peploe are the memories of our friendship which was wonderful and interesting all the time. Nothing about it was spectacular. It was merely a happy unbroken friendship between two painters who both believed that painting was not just a craft or profession but a sustained attempt at finding a means of expressing reactions to life in the form demanded by each new experience. This is quite different from arriving at a way of doing a thing and continuing to do it in a tradesmanlike manner. By life we meant everything that happened to us; and, as we were curious about life, we painted all sorts of things – men, women, children, landscape, seapieces, flowers, still-life – anything.” Memories of Peploe, J. D. Fergusson, 1945

The Studios and Chronology See pages 14 and 15 for annotated map

1871 27th January, Samuel John born at 38 Manor Place, Edinburgh. 1874 His mother, born Anne Hickock Watson, died after giving birth to his younger sister Annie. 1883 His father, Robert Luff Peploe, Assistant Secretary of the Commercial Bank of Scotland died, leaving Sam, his younger sister Annie and elder brother William to be looked after by Trustees and a nanny. He attended the Collegiate School, Charlotte Square. c.1892 Began work at the solicitors Scott & Glover in Hill Street before commencing classes at the Trustees’ Academy, Royal Institution building on Princes Street. 1894 Travelled to Paris attending the Academy Julian under the elderly classicist Guillaume Bouguereau. Robert Brough was a fellow student and friend. He also gained a silver medal at the Academy Colarossi. Made his first trip to The Hebrides, to Barra with his brother on the yacht Nell, owned by their friend, another painter called R. C. Robertson. Here Peploe met his future wife Margaret Mackay who was working in the Post Office in Castlebay.

S. J. Peploe at 7 Devon Place studio, c.1902–1904

1895 Awarded the Maclean Watters medal at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) Life Class. Worked in a small studio at the Albert Building, Shandwick Place. The handsome sandstone, six-bay, four storey and attic building designed by W. Hamilton Beattie, the architect of Jenners Department Store, was finished in 1877. Originally it had a substantial gallery, but by the mid-nineties had mixed use including retailers, artists, music teachers and artisans. Peploe had one of the small studios on the top floor with north light from sky lights. Here he painted paid models and still lifes, low in tone, all influenced by Dutch painting and Edouard Manet. 1896 Exhibited his first work, Charcoal Drawing, at the Royal Glasgow Institute. Made study trip to Holland. 8

A. Peploe in his Devon Place studio, c.1902

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

1900 Occupied studio at 7 Devon Place, long since demolished. By all accounts it was a rather gloomy place, but clearly he had top light which allowed him to create his sumptuous still lifes: The Lobster, The Black Bottle and Silver Coffee Pot. “On fine days I sometimes called at Peploe’s studio in Devon Place. When I asked him to come out he would say, ‘When it is fine outside, it’s fine inside!’ Most people don’t realise how true that is in a studio planned, decorated and lit for painting. So we sometimes had tea instead of a walk. But we also had long walks and long talks. Often when I had put some idea forward at great length he would say, ‘I’ll give you the answer tomorrow.’ And he did.” Memories of Peploe, J. D. Fergusson, 1945 1902 Painted at Comrie where his sister and brother-in-law had moved. Began annual painting trips with J. D. Fergusson to Northern France.

B. 32 York Place – the Raeburn Studio

1903 In November, he held his first solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery, Castle Street, Edinburgh. 1905 Occupied the Raeburn Studio, at 32 York Place, Edinburgh. It is clear that a change of studio provided a fresh start and impetus to the artist who was by character self-critical and wary of complacency. In coming to the Raeburn Studio at 32 York Place in 1905 the physical contrast was dramatic; Stanley Cursiter, Peploe’s first biographer, describes the studio, built for Raeburn a hundred years before, as a room facing north with elaborate shutters to provide the perfect adjustment of lighting. “Peploe decorated the room in a pale grey with a hint of pink; on the floor he had a black polished linoleum, an antique bureau, an easel and a model’s throne. Here he painted in a very light key, flowers, mostly roses, still life, interiors and figure paintings in pale and lovely colours. He had a new model, Peggy McRae.” 1907 Painted at Le Touquet-Paris-Plage and visited Paris. The newly formed Scottish Modern Art Society acquired his Still Life with Bananas from the Royal Scottish Academy.

The stairway to the North facing Raeburn studio on the top floor, York Place

1909 In March, held his second solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery.

1910 S. J. Peploe married Margaret Mackay and shortly afterwards moved to Paris to a studio apartment at 278 Boulevard Raspail. They moved to Royan and continued to paint. First son, Willy, born in 1910. 1911 In June he worked at Île-de-Bréhat, Brittany, before returning to Edinburgh to raise funds, leaving his family in Paris. 1912 In June he occupied a studio at 34 Queen Street and a flat at 13 India Street. He was invited to show his paintings in the modernist show at Stafford Galleries, London, alongside J. D. Fergusson. This was his first studio after the return from Paris, and the only commentary that survives from the artist is on its unsuitability in the summer, when the pervasive green from the gardens to the North became oppressive to the infinitely sensitive Peploe.

Boulevard Raspail, Paris J. D. Fergusson’s hand-drawn map of Montparnasse © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council

Paris, Jardin du Luxembourg, c.1910

Paris, Le Boulevard Montmartre, c.1910

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Albert Buildings Studio Plan © Courtesy of HES (Cowie and Seaton Collection)

C. Entrance to Albert Building 1913 In May, he exhibited at New Gallery, Shandwick Place, Edinburgh after his Modernist work was rejected by The Scottish Gallery Director, Peter McOmish Dott. By August, he was in Cassis, on the Mediterranean for the first time, again accompanied by his family and J. D. Fergusson.

D. Queen Street, c.1950 © Courtesy of HES

1914 25th March, his second son Denis was born in Edinburgh. 28th July WWI begins. F. C. B. Cadell volunteers but is initially deemed unfit. The following year he enlisted with the Dandy Ninth Battalion of the Royal Scots as a private soldier. He began a correspondence with Peploe for the duration of the War. The times were also very stressful for Peploe: the lack of representation, the start of the Great War, and within a few years the certainty of being called up as the grim continental conflict dragged on. Peploe was rated a ‘three’ by the Office of War initially and, partly to get fitter, he spent many months down in Stewartry, visiting Jessie King and E. A. Taylor and finding some new subjects in Kirkcudbright and at Crawford. 1915 Painted in Kirkcudbright and in November had an exhibition with Alexander Reid, Glasgow.

E. 13 India Street became home for the Peploes in 1912

1916 Zeppelin raid on Edinburgh in April which kills 16 civilians. Denis Peploe’s first memory was looking at the airships from the back window of the family flat. 11

1917 Elected Associate of Royal Scottish Academy. 1918 Occupied studio at 54 Shandwick Place. The studio was accessed up two flights of stairs at the back, overlooking Queensferry Street Lane. It was a well-proportioned room with light coming from angled windows facing north. This place was to be his most productive and longest occupied studio, where the experimental years of the First War bore the fruit of both maturity and originality. His first exhibited works in the RSA annual show were of tulips and given titles which make no pretence as to their purpose: one was Study, Volumes, Depth, the second Study Centre Focus. Peploe had long embarked on a quest of investigation to discover and elucidate the formal relationships of shape, volume and colour which deliver the most exquisite satisfaction. 1919 Painted at Douglas Hall on the Solway and Dalbeattie. In November he held second solo exhibition with Alex Reid.

F. Shandwick Place, Edinburgh

1920 Visited Iona, most impressed with possibilities at the north end of the island. A summer or autumn visit became a regular yearly trip alongside F. C. B. Cadell. Peploe was often with the family, who might go on to South Uist to visit Margaret’s relations and would rent a cottage or stay at one of the two hotels. 1922 In February he held his third solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery under the Directorship of George Proudfoot. 1923 January opened with an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London with F. C. B. Cadell and G. L. Hunter. 1924 In June he exhibited alongside J. D. Fergusson, G. L. Hunter and F. C. B. Cadell at Gallerie Barbazanges, Paris, as Les Peintres de l’Ecosse Modernes. The group became known at this time as The Scottish Modernists. 1924 Summer and autumn he stayed in Cassis with family at the Hotel Panorama. Cadell joined the group. 1925 In January he was included in second exhibition at The Leicester Galleries, including J. D. Fergusson.

The back of 54 Shandwick Place, North facing studio with skylights overlooking Queensferry Street Lane

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

1926 Painted at New Abbey in Dumfries and Galloway. 1927 Elected full member of Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. 1928 In January, he had a solo exhibition with C. W. Kraushaar Gallery, New York. Later that year he travelled to Antibes, staying for several months before revisiting Cassis. 1929 In the autumn, he was painting at Boat of Garten. Willy Peploe went to Magdalen College, Oxford to read History. 1930 Sam and Margaret spent the winter and spring in Cassis, the boys joining for the Easter holiday. G. Castle Street, early 20th century © HES

1931 In March, he exhibited as Les Peintres Ecossais at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris with Cadell, Hunter, Fergusson, Telfer Bear and R. O. Dunlop. The show would be reprised at Barbizon House, London the following March. The French State acquired a landscape made near Shambellie House, Dumfries, the previous summer and a typical Iona seascape. September, Denis Peploe began his diploma course at Edinburgh College of Art. In December, he moved to his final studio on the corner of Queen Street and Castle Street. This move was made in the spirit of optimism, though his health had begun to deteriorate. The studio was closer to home in India Street and had a single flight of stairs. A few structural alterations were required and then he decorated in light tones with a black floor and coloured drapes. Alas, he was only to finish a couple of pictures in his new studio. 1932 Began to suffer significant ill health caused by thyroid illness.

S. J. Peploe, Margaret and Mrs Pyatt on Princes Street, Edinburgh c.1920

1933 In the summer he painted at Calvine. From October 1933, he taught senior and post-Diploma students at Edinburgh College of Art, including Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. 1934 In the summer he painted at Rothiemurchus. 1935 The artist visited Iona for the last time in the summer but was unable to work due to ill health. On 11th October, Samuel John Peploe died in a nursing home after a failed operation to treat his thyroid. 13

Plan of Edinburgh and Leith, 1912. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

B E D G

Robert Luff Peploe, c.1880

Anne Watson, the artist’s mother, c.1873

S. J. Peploe, c.1880

Sam, Annie and Willy, c.1880

Royal Scottish Academy Life Class, 1892–3 16

Sam and Willy with their mother

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Académie Julien, 1893

Margaret Mackay (Peploe), c.1895

Sam, Margaret and Willy in Paris, c.1911

Denis and Margaret, Kirkcudbright, c.1919

S. J. Peploe and his students, Edinburgh College of Art, Easter 1934 17

Still Life

“… you forget that it is a mere painted surface; and indeed the brushwork, with all its expressiveness, is so elusive, so unsubstantial, that the living image seems to be created by magic. Mr Peploe has realised to the fullest that to conceal art is the greatest art. He makes you forget the materiality of his paint…” The Observer, 1909

Still Life

The subject of still life (surely a more poetic description than the French ‘dead nature’) is Peploe’s best known and most celebrated subject. Its appeal to the artist is twofold: the challenge of creating a harmonious arrangement, what Roger Fry called significant form and secondly the depiction of beauty. Peploe’s understanding of beauty contains the assumption that the formal requirements of his craft have to be satisfied. He could see beauty in simple, unpretentious things, and had a horror of the showy and flamboyant in art, design and nature. When the SMAA (Scottish Modern Art Association) made its first purchases in 1907, with a mind to plenishing a collection of contemporary Scottish painting, there was some controversy over its choice of Peploe’s Still Life with Bananas, a typically dashing example of the subject made in his York Place studio. Critics could see the logic of landscapes with figures by Hornel, E. A. Walton and James Patterson, but what was elevating about bananas? Here is the nub of Modernism manifesting itself in the 20th century: an artist was free to paint whatever he or she wished; there was no longer a hierarchy of subjects: the artist would decide what was worthy of depiction. Consider the objects he painted: a blue earthenware jug, some oriental blue and white vases, French paperbacks, a black teapot, a small cast of Venus de Medici and so on. What is striking is the realisation of transformation, the alchemy of base metal turning into gold. A rose in bloom is nature’s perfection (and is able to satisfy all our senses). In a Peploe rosepiece, the perfection and sumptuousness of the rose is captured, but it is made more by the

subtlety and satisfaction in its place in his schema. While Peploe would deny any deliberate symbolism in his still life, he had strong associations with flowers. He wrote to a friend before he died: “Flowers, how wonderful they are: I have a bunch of tulips, so gay, of so many colours; orange, pink, different pinks, a strange one – pure brick red – which is my favourite; so sensitive to warmth; the tulip with the strange hot smell which seems to stir deep memories, long forgotten cities in a desert of sand, blazing sky, sun that is a torment; mauve ones, cool and insensitive. Living their close, unrevealed life; unexposed but keeping their beauty of form till the very end, longest of all dark ones opening and closing.” While the artist’s choice of subject was a constant throughout his life: still life, the figure and landscape, what was not fixed, far from it, was his stylistic means. Once he had demonstrated (chiefly to himself) that he could draw with a brush onto canvas and board, that he could set aside the careful draftsmanship of the student, that he could choose a colour to represent reality rather than to heed Ruskin and copy it, then he was free to experiment. For Peploe, it was always the next picture that was the most important and the danger was complacency and feeble repetition: what he called ‘damned efficient painting.’ Art history is in a sense unforgiving: if an artist is associated with a movement, with a time of innovation and advance, turning over the dry academic work of the previous decade, then obscurity can lurk beyond the spotlight. Consider the fate of Derain after he was a Fauve, or

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

de Chirico beyond his brief association with the Surrealists. But Peploe’s innovations from his early, fluid, tonal work to his way with colour, to Cezannesque analysis in the difficult years of the Great War, to the sumptuous colourist roses of the twenties, and finally to the rich sonorous still lifes and landscapes of his last phase successfully navigate the path between change and development, influence and originality, relevance and timelessness. Great artists do not reinvent themselves for the times, they just keep looking in wonder. “[Peploe’s] concentration on still life arose from the desire to have complete control over conditions and circumstances. He could plan the limits of his colour scheme and devise the intermediate notes; the intensity and direction of the light; the form and pattern of his group. The arrangement of a group might occupy his attention for days, or even weeks, but, when it at last reached his standard of balance and design, it could, like a piece of sculpture, be viewed from various angles and be the subject of two or more paintings. In this way, Peploe’s work became a form of visual music in which every note of colour took its place in a melodic scheme, to which the setting or background presented the harmony and the design or pattern stated the tempo.”

Still Life with Bottle, c.1912 oil on canvas, 51 x 51 cm signed lower right Private collection

Stanley Cursiter, S. J. Peploe, National Gallery of Scotland, March 1941

1. Still Life with Roses, c.1898 oil on panel, 35 x 26.5 cm Provenance: Willy Peploe, thence by descent Still Life with Roses combines the simplicity and sophistication characteristic of Peploe’s still lifes. His props are confined to cloth, fan and vase with two rose heads, the space created with a series of subtle triangulations. A fallen rose petal (while not necessarily laden with symbolic significance!) is completely necessary for the balance of the composition. Peploe began to exhibit about this time and, never prolific, this work might well have been included in his first solo show at The Scottish Gallery in 1903.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

By the time of the artist’s death in 1935, James Caw had come to recognise Peploe as one of Scotland’s greatest painters. Caw was the biographer of his father-in-law William McTaggart and wrote a History of Scottish Art, published in 1908. He became the director of the Scottish National Gallery and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery from 1907–1930. When he reviewed Peploe’s first exhibition in 1903, his praise was heavily qualified; he identified a ‘perverse taste for the ugly or the bizarre in figure and landscape’ and a lack of subtlety of vision. Certainly Peploe’s early work is bold and his subjects were not chosen for their inherent beauty; even The Lobster (which Caw singles out for particular praise) is a difficult subject: an admirable lunch and a complex, fascinating creature, but certainly a challenge to the painter. Peploe has made out of it one of his masterpieces. Peploe admired seventeenth century Dutch painting and had made a study trip to Holland in the mid-1890s, and that still life tradition, which includes specialist painters of the profusion of the fishmonger’s table, is acknowledged. His composition however is uncluttered, much closer in spirit to Chardin or Manet. This was Peploe’s first exhibition, and the obsessive care he took in the preparations (including painting and repainting a frieze in one of the rooms) indicates a personality trait and a recognition after many years of study and preparation that, at the age of thirty-three, this exhibition would launch his career as an exhibiting artist. Peploe’s skill was in perfect balance with his confidence: the bone handle of the knife is made up of three brushstrokes and every mark is assured and perfectly placed. The beautifully graded tones of the table-top merge into background: olive to a black enriched with burnt sienna. The harmony of his arrangement, a loose rhombus made of lobster, knife, plate and lemon is perfectly lit to allow a maximum impact of colour and tonal contrast. The vertically placed signature in lobster colour seems a self-consciously stylish touch: like a piece of oriental calligraphy – but it is also an essential part of his composition.

The Lobster, c.1901 oil on canvas, 41 x 51 cm signed vertically upper right Provenance: J.J. Cowan; William Home Cook; J.W Blyth, thence by descent; Private collection 24

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

2. Pink Rose in a Glass Vase with Fruit, c.1925 oil on canvas, 45.7 x 40.5 cm signed lower right Provenance: Aitken Dott & Son, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 26

Peploe’s rose pieces from this period are sublime images and for many the most enduring and successful of all his oeuvre. They are a subtle progression from the more stylised tulips and roses of the previous years towards naturalism, but with no sacrifice of colour. Essentially, flat areas of a single pigment seen in Tulips and Fruit (p.31) have been replaced by a more naturalistic treatment. However the same sophistication in design approach is apparent. In this example a single pink rose stem is placed in a glass vase, while another white bloom lies on the table. The brilliant colour of an orange is repeated, refracted through the glass. A strong corner of the table on which the still life is posed gives the composition focus, as the picture on the wall behind reinforces a reading of real space. Peploe uses a rich impasto to describe the crumpled tablecloth and hanging drape behind, and the brilliant whites carry the stronger colour notes which can radiate across a room. A pear is included: a piece of fruit which demands to be modelled rather than the disc of the apple or orange. It initiates a more considered, tonal future which will see him paint pewter, a loaf of bread, or a pair of chops on a piece of butcher’s paper over the next years.

In a happy twist of fate, a Bourlet & Co. French finished cover ground frame with a lively pattern came to us recently. From a label on the back we know it had (at some point) a Denis Peploe West Highland landscape in it, but it was without doubt a frame which had come to the artist from the studio of his own father, S. J. Peploe, and was typical of the frames made for the rose paintings of the twenties. At the same time we had acquired Pink Roses in a Glass Vase framed in a barely adequate Czech frame from the fifties. The reunion of frame and picture lends a rightness to the whole, which is hugely satisfying.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Tulips and Fruit, c.1919 oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm signed lower right Exhibited: S. J. Peploe, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2012 Provenance: Private collection Illustrated: S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl.128 (front cover of first edition); S. J. Peploe, National Galleries of Scotland, 2012, pl.68 “Flowers, how wonderful they are: I have a bunch of tulips, so gay, of so many colours: orange, pink, different pinks, a strange one – pure brick red – which is my favourite; so sensitive to warmth; the tulip with the strange hot smell which seems to stir deep memories, long-forgotten cities in a desert of sand, blazing sky, sun that is a torment; mauve ones, cool and insensitive. Living their closed, unrevealed life; unexposed, but keeping their beauty of form till the very end, longest of all, dark ones, opening and closing in slow rhythm.” S. J. Peploe

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Roses, c.1924 oil on canvas, 61 x 50.8 cm signed lower right Exhibited: S. J. Peploe, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2012 Provenance: Private collection Illustrated: S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl.72; S. J. Peploe, National Galleries of Scotland, 2012, pl.136 32

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

The Models

Jeannie Blyth

The figure was his most significant early subject, and from 1896, for over a decade, Jeannie Blyth was Peploe’s favourite model. She was born around 1883, so was perhaps fifteen when they met. She was a direct descendant of Charles Faa Blythe, the last King of the Gypsies who died at Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders in 1902. Her family had a flower stall at the west end of Princes Street, close to the Albert Building on Shandwick Place where Peploe had his first studio. She was a natural sitter, responding to suggested poses with the inhibition of youth. Smiling Girl (p.39) is supposed to be the first painting he sold, to another painter, Alexander Fraser and she is posed with both hands on her left hip, smiling with open mouth over the shoulder where her loose hair tumbles over the puffed sleeves of her coral blouse. Gypsy of the same time is another character study, another difficult subject as the painter captures the insouciance of youthful confidence. She poses with her hair tied back, but unruly, her colour is high and her blouse off the shoulder, as if she had been dancing. Kirkcaldy Museum holds a pastel drawing of her in a dance pose and we can imagine that Peploe has allowed her to dance as he drew, expressing her exuberance. Jeannie continued to pose and a few years later she is captured in a unique painting currently titled Gypsy in a Landscape (cat.3); it may well be the picture titled Gypsy Queen, purchased by The Scottish Gallery in 1898.

Gypsy, c.1896 oil on canvas Private collection

Portrait of Jeannie Blyth, c.1900 The portrait was gifted to Jeannie by S. J. Peploe as a wedding present in 1901. Its whereabouts today are unknown.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Portrait of Jeannie (p.43) comes from c.1903 when Peploe was in the Devon Place studio and again makes character the subject of the portrait. The look once more is full of attitude, the head at an angle, the glance downwards; Jeannie may be holding a dance pose with her hands on her hips. The ivory flesh tones of her face and long neck are freely painted, the likeness effortless as Peploe works alla prima, the whole portrait likely taking no more than a morning. The family did not approve of her continuing to pose for Peploe after her marriage but at least one significant work was made nearer 1905: The Green Blouse, held by the National Galleries of Scotland. Jeannie had married in the early years of the 20th century and we know from the memoire and research of Linda Lennan, her great-granddaughter, that life was hard. As we can see from the photograph opposite (lower left) she had numerous family and a hard working life; she died in 1938.

Above: Jeannie Blyth with her niece, Maggie Left: Jeannie with her husband and family, c.1930 37

The Smiling Girl, c.1896 oil on board, 59 x 41 cm signed upper left Exhibited: S. J. Peploe Memorial Exhibition, Aitken Dott & Son, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1936, cat. 39; S. J. Peploe Memorial Exhibition, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, 1937, cat.28 Provenance: Private collection, Edinburgh When A. J. McNeill Reid wrote to Mrs Fraser, thanking her for the loan of Smiling Girl to the Memorial Show which took place at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow in 1937, he reminded her that this work was the first sold by the artist, from the RSA Annual Exhibition in 1896, thus heralding a long, successful exhibiting career. The painting remained in the collection of Alexander Fraser and by descent was lent to the ACGB, Scottish Committee show curated by Denis Peploe in 1953. After this it disappeared, known only by black and white illustration. Guy Peploe was therefore delighted when the family contacted him in response to the build up to the Peploe 150th exhibition and made it available for loan. A pastel drawing of Jeannie Blyth (below) in the same pose is known, but she pouts, the smile gone. This variety is a clear demonstration that artist and model worked together; it is perhaps surprising that the smile is in oils, a much ‘slower’ medium with which to capture the spontaneity of a smile – an expression quite impossible to maintain. A sunny disposition and the bloom of youth is brilliantly captured by an artist already setting himself the sort of painterly challenges which will characterise his lifelong approach.

Jeannie Blyth, c.1896 pastel on paper Private collection 38

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

3. Gypsy in a Landscape, c.1898 oil on canvas, 56 x 51 cm signed lower right Provenance: Ian MacNicol, Glasgow; Private collection, London Illustrated: S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl.30 Jeannie engages the viewer directly in a classical, three-quarters pose, draped in a heavy cloak, clasped protectively together below her breast, her red blouse underneath. Behind is an extensive landscape with fields and a hillside. The setting adds narrative possibility to the interpretation, the gypsy as eternal traveller, unconstrained by roots. It is tempting also to speculate that Peploe’s avowed admiration for Thomas Hardy has found expression in a poignant evoking of rural poverty and the risks and sacrifice of pregnancy.

Portrait of Jeannie, c.1903 oil on canvas, 51 x 51 cm signed lower right Provenance: Private collection This bust portrait of Jeannie is dated around 1903–4. She has gained a maturity and hauteur in the years since Smiling Girl and Gypsy. The pose is, as often, active: she turns her head and tilts it back so that her look is ‘down her nose’. If her hands were above her head, we would be looking at a flamenco pose, the hair tossed as the head moves from side to side to the rhythm of the castanets. The creamy skin of her neck and shoulders is the tonal highlight and her face is pink at the cheekbones and lips a natural coral red.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Peggy Macrae

The paintings of Peggy Macrae made in the Raeburn Studio from 1907–1909 are remarkable for their technical achievements as well as the evocation of character and suggested narrative. They are consummately elegant works, anchored in La Belle Epoque, inspired in large part by the model herself who worked with the painter on the pose and setting. There are many drawings and some head studies in oil, and a few large scale compositions. The White Dress (cat. 4) is painted with quite extraordinary freedom: long, fluid brushstrokes and shorter impressionist touches are combined; light illuminates and dissolves form. It is the differences that dominate in paintings of the same subject painted within a year or two of each other. This comes without doubt in part from the model whose ability to suggest character is within a suggested narrative: one at a bar, another after the ball the third an elusive presence of beauty in an undefined interior. Peploe, a brilliant draughtsman with conté crayon or brush, deliberately subverts conventional description, instead painting instinctively with broad marks, modelling in light and revealing character rather than building layers of reality. The subject and the elegance of the poses group these works with the portraiture of Whistler, Sargent or even the French society painter Giovanni Boldini, but technically they are closer to the distortions employed by Derain, Matisse and Picasso. These works would be criticised by some as moving towards the crude or even ugly.

4. The White Dress, c.1908 oil on canvas, 102 x 76 cm signed lower right 44

The White Dress is perhaps the earliest of several large, ambitious paintings. Peggy is seated in an undefined interior space described in a delicious, elusive palette of grey, mauve, green and white enlivened by swift, broad marks in light tones. Her face is upturned, the cheekbones accentuated, her look serene. She wears a fascinator with a pink rose, and the pink is intensified in her lips and cooler in the flesh tones of her exposed shoulder. The dress flows, is it a wedding dress? Its shape delineated with passages of lilac, blue, purple and a green – a signature colour which will be seen in the modernist work to follow. The artist uses a rounded, hog-hair brush and sweeps the paint onto the canvas in long gestures, some more than two feet in length. His athletic, active painting, moving back and forward to the easel from a vantage some yards back to consider and then dancing forward on the balls of his feet to make his mark. He works alla prima – the delicacy of the painted surface will bear no revision or scraping out, and the whole will have been finished in perhaps two sittings. Peploe himself recognised the brilliance of these works, which were shown in his 1909 exhibition at The Scottish Gallery, as having no parallel in British painting; but he saw them as at the limit of impressionism. His way forward would be another change of studio, in a new city: Paris.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

4. The White Dress, c.1908 oil on canvas, 102 x 76 cm signed lower right Exhibited: S. J. Peploe Memorial Exhibition, Aitken Dott & Son, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1936, cat. 60 (possibly as The Girl in White); S. J. Peploe, Reid & Lefevre, London, 1948, cat. 1; S. J. Peploe, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1985, cat. 44 (as The White Lady); The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2005 Provenance: Private collection, Edinburgh 46

Margaret Mackay – Mrs Peploe

Peploe first visited Barra with his brother on the yacht Nell, commissioned by the painter Robert Cowan Robertson (1863–1910) from yacht designer George Watson, and launched at Greenock in 1887. The painters stayed on the Atlantic side of the island at Borve but Peploe met Margaret Mackay in Castlebay where she was working in the Post Office. The story goes that with the island predominantly Catholic, the Post Office had to recruit Margaret from Loch Boisdale in South Uist – the predominantly Protestant island to the north. She came from a large family with siblings and halfsiblings. One cousin found notoriety as the determined Excise Officer pursuing the islanders who took whisky from the wreck of SS Politician after its wreck on Eriskay in 1941. Margaret was a beautiful, serene young woman of nineteen with long black hair, a fine carriage and a serenity in presence which was reflected in her character. After correspondence she sought a transfer to the Post Office in Frederick Street in Edinburgh, and took lodgings in Marchmont. They did not marry until 1910 when she fell pregnant. But for these years she was his muse and inspiration and the paintings he made of her speak of love and a deep connection. He found her as a calm, serene, untroubled being: the perfect foil to his own personality, wracked with doubts. He wrote later of his marriage as a kind of liberation derived by accepting the ‘chains of marriage’ and their union was deeply happy and fulfilled. After his death she was the guardian of his reputation, cooperating with The Scottish Gallery

and Reid & Lefevre over several exhibitions, as well as with Stanley Cursiter as her husband’s first biographer and Director of the National Galleries of Scotland. She died in Edinburgh in 1959, shortly after the birth of her grandchild Lucy, born to Denis and Elizabeth Peploe. Peploe drew her often and made paintings throughout their lives together. The earliest known work (shown opposite) is on panel and seems to seek to capture her independence and character: she is after all living an independent life, with a career in one of the few organisations which allowed women this opportunity in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, even boasting its own Association of Post Office Woman Clerks founded in 1901. She is, as often, in a hat and wears a sensible brown coat, a yellow flower in her button-hole. Ten or so years later he painted her in a large format seated, completely at ease in a dark interior, her arm stretched across the back of the sofa on which she sits. Guy Peploe commented in his biography on the portraits of this period. ‘The very best combine the bravura performance of painting with an emotional commitment which brings out the character of the sitter. This is most apparent, not surprisingly, in a portrait of Margaret of c.1905 which speaks of mutual love in the steady, direct engagement of the eyes and complete relaxation of the pose.’ The right-hand portrait Mrs Peploe hangs in the recently refurbished Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Margaret, c.1905 oil on panel Private collection

Mrs Peploe, c.1907 oil on canvas, 61 x 50.9 cm signed lower right Image courtesy Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Collection 49

Mrs Peploe, c.1911 oil on board, 35.5 x 27.3 cm signed lower right Exhibited: S. J. Peploe, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2012 Illustrated: S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl.88; S. J. Peploe, National Galleries of Scotland, 2012, pl.54 In 1985 the SNGMA reopened in its new home at Watson’s College, having removed from Inverleith House in the Botanic Gardens: an event worthy of a Royal guest to officiate. The opening exhibition was an S. J. Peploe retrospective, curated by Guy Peploe. His first job was to conduct HRH The Queen around the show. They paused in front of Mrs Peploe and Guy explained that it was a Modernist love portrait made in Royan around the time of the birth of their first child, Willy. He explained the green flesh tones, recalling a Matisse of his wife called The Green Line. HRH paused before asking rhetorically “I wonder what your grandmother thought of having a green face…”

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

The Colourist

Peploe had an extraordinary sensitivity to colour – he may have been tetrachromatic. The complementary nature of colour, the tonal values of different colours, the infinite possibilities afforded by mixing paints – this was his lifelong obsession. He became able to push the value of a particular colour beyond naturalism without abandoning the immediate truth of his subject. This shift can be compared to the develoment from Impressionism to Expressionism embodied in the work of Matisse and Derain who became known as the Fauves – wild beasts – for their work in Collioure and elsewhere from 1905. Twenty years before, Gauguin and Van Gogh made a similar shift, using colour to direct emotional effect to expose the intensity of their response to subject, starry night or Tahitian forest. Peploe’s moment of transformation happened in 1910, in Royan. Peploe married Margaret Mackay on 5th April 1910 at the Morningside Registry Office. They had decided to move to Paris and would break the journey at Broadway in the Cotswolds. He had written a month before: ‘I see the train leaves at 10.15. That is the only morning train and the next is 2.00 o’clock which is too late. Shall we need to get married at 8.00 o’clock in the morning; why not? Before breakfast.’ The move had long been urged by J. D. Fergusson, already living in Montparnasse, but the immediate spur was Margaret’s pregnancy. They set up home in a tiny studio apartment at 278 Boulevard Raspail but by August had joined Fergusson and Anne Estelle Rice in Royan in the Charente. Willy was born on 29th August. Royan was a grand resort on the north of the Gironde estuary with a port cut into the limestone cliff. Four beaches known as conches alternate with stone promontories to the north, with La Grande Conche to the south: a magnificent curving beach with trees behind and, in 1910, a little railway to move the tourists along. 54

The huge Second Empire Casino Municipale dominated the promenade and many other fine civic buildings and hotels made it a resort to rival any in Europe with a huge influx of summer visitors. Hundreds of bright, striped sun shelters could be rented as well as mobile beach huts. The couple were joined in the Charente by Fergusson and his American artist partner Anne Estelle Rice. These were the happiest of times and for Peploe the work flowed out: brilliantly coloured paintings on artist-panels, bought from the Paris American Art Co. in Montparnasse. His subjects were the promenade and harbour of the resort, the seafront casino and streets of holiday homes behind the front; his palette: brilliant cadmium orange, yellow and red, Prussian blue – all straight from the tube and white for the high tones of the Atlantic summer. His impasto was generous, worked with the extraordinary dexterity he had developed in his practice, as if all had been a preparation for this moment of revelation and joy – the way of colour. The work Peploe made here can now be seen as thoroughly Modernist: the palette is bold and, like the Fauves at Collioure four years before, he moves away from naturalism to push colour as a direct, emotional tool no doubt reflecting the freedom and excitement he felt as his life moved into a new sphere. The Royan pictures of the harbour and streets of villas behind the front, images of the Paris parks, and those made in Brittany

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

the following summer can be seen together as one of the great engagements made by a British artist with French Modernism. Light is no longer a dissolving form and instead a new structure is sought: natural forms are simplified and non-naturalistic colour preferred. These were the works that would be initially rejected by the dealers and collectors who had been his patrons but Peploe was not for turning, and the balance of his life as a painter looks forward, never back. When Guy Peploe visited Royan before writing his biography in 2000 he expected to experience the resort as it had been in Edwardian times; but alas the town had been destroyed by allied bombing, becoming known as ‘the martyred city.’ Over 2,700 civilians were killed between British and American raids, the Americans finally destroying the entire town with napalm. It was rebuilt in the fifties with little charm visible in its modernist homogeneity. But at least the light and colour were still there. “These outstanding works are also the culmination of Peploe’s work as an Impressionist. It is however an impressionism that has come a long way from the influence of William McTaggart or Alfred Sisley evident in the early years of the century… Instead Peploe seeks to find in his painted surface a direct equivalent to his subject, harnessing the power of light to make colour vibrate; to make permanent the compelling beauty he saw in a marina, street or promenade.” It is not surprising that the curators of the International Fauvism exhibition at the Musee d’Art Moderne in 2000 selected a wall of Peploe and Fergusson’s Royan panels.

Above: a note from André Dezarrois to S. J. Peploe, 1931 Translation: “Thank you sir for your kind letter. The Scottish Exhibition was excellent and the works you sent were particularly interesting. I am delighted with the two pictures the Musée du Louvre have bought. My best compliments, AD.” André Dezarrois is a significant figure in the history of French art. He was Director of the contemporary art magazine La Revue de l’Art and later became Director of Foreign Art at the new Jeu de Paume when it opened its doors to the public in 1933. In the 1920s and 30s public feeling still swayed toward traditional French painting. It was Dezarrois and a number of others who realised the existence of a significant foreign presence living and working in Paris that was not being recognized by the French State. Dezarrois heralded a change throughout the 1930s by organising exhibitions of foreign artists who were living and working in Paris. Exhibitions he organised included Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Miro, Klee and Magritte. He was also responsible for buying foreign art for the French national collection, and bought two S. J. Peploes from Les Peintres Ecossais at Galerie Georges Petit in 1931. 55

J. D. Fergusson and S. J. Peploe, Paris Plage, c.1907

Fergusson in his Paris studio, c.1910, © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council Anne Estelle Rice, S. J. Peploe, Willy, J. D. Fergusson, Cassis, 1913

Sam, Margaret and Willy in Paris, c.1910

J. D. Fergusson, Margaret and Willy Peploe, c.1913

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Margaret Morris’s Summer School, 1924, Cap d’Antibes Merle Taylor, Sam, Denis and Margaret Peploe, Jessie M. King and Willy Peploe at La Rotonde, Paris, c.1921

Margaret, Sam and Willy, Cassis 1924

S. J. Peploe at Cassis, 1924

5. Paris Plage, c.1907 oil on panel, 34 x 39 cm signed on verso Provenance: The Fine Art Society, London; The Frank and Lorna Dunphy Collection, London

Le Touquet-Paris-Plage is a resort on the Normandy coast which has endured as a tourist destination since it was founded in 1876 by Hippolyte de Villemessant, the owner of Le Figaro. The land was bought by an Englishman in 1903 and it became as fashionable in London as it did in Paris, with golf courses and a racecourse being added to the splendid architecture which characterizes the seafront. At the northern end the river Canche disgorges into the Channel and from there miles of beach stretch to the south. There is an immense tidal reach and so huge capacity for the holidaymaker to sit, exercise or bathe. Peploe began to visit in the early years of the century, often with his friend J. D. Fergusson. They both painted a variety of

subjects including the view across the sand towards the sea, and a horizon often lost in haze so that the subject, devoid of its holidaymakers as dawn or dusk, could be almost abstract and without features. Through one hundred and eighty degrees the view could not be in more contrast: the traffic of the streets, colourful bathing tents and fashionable denizens of the grand hotels and casinos taking their afternoon promenade are described in flurries of paint. By 1907 Peploe was approaching the limit of his engagement with Impressionism and the freedom and fluidity of his marks are astonishing and indeed in great contrast to the short ‘touche’ deployed by Sisley or Monet.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, c.1910 oil on panel, 27 x 35 cm signed lower right Exhibited: Modern Masters VIII, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2018, cat. 27 Provenance: The Artist’s family and thence by descent; Private collection Illustrated: S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl.108

Peploe moved to Paris in the spring of 1910, as the city was recovering from the catastrophic flooding in January. The unhealthiness of the city was no doubt a good reason for Sam and Margaret, then heavily pregnant with their first child, to move to Royan in the Charente where Willy was born in August. The panels (all acquired from the Paris American Art Co. in Montparnasse) which the artist painted in the summer and autumn are full of optimism reflecting his happiness and perhaps a sense of liberation in his final commitment to wife and family. This energy and freedom is also tangible in the works made in Paris on the family’s return to the tiny studio apartment at

278 Boulevard Raspail. Long considered to be of the south of France, but now positively identified as The Luxembourg Gardens, this painting is one of the most powerful examples of Peploe’s short, Fauvist period: the time is dusk, the sky a livid yellow but the sense of heat is palpable as figures sit in the shade of the dramatic canopy of the palms; in the background high trees partially mask the profile of the palace roof. Luxembourg Gardens, Paris is painted with strong, directional marks, its angularities, brilliant colour and rich impasto are strong statements of confidence from an artist entirely at one with himself and his objectives.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Royan, c.1910

Street Scene, France, c.1911 oil on board, 34.3 x 26.8 cm Provenance: Private collection Illustrated: Cover Illustration, The Scottish Colourists, Philip Long, SNGMA, 2000; S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl.80 62

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

6. Royan Harbour, c.1910 oil on board, 27 x 34.9 cm signed lower right and verso Provenance: Mme Marie Marguerite Soulie, Paris, (wife of author Arnold Bennett), thence by direct descent

In Royan Harbour, Peploe has chosen the aspect looking from the broad promenade down the harbour walls which enclose the marina. Tourists move down the slipway to the boats in the anchorage; the lighthouse is visible at the end of a further breakwater over which is seen the turquoise lateen sale of a yacht. Reds and blues indicate buildings on the far side of La Grande Conche. His palette is jewel-like: sapphire, ruby and pearl with the characteristic zingy orange notes which play through all the Royan pictures.

Royan Harbour, c.1910 64

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Royan, 1910 oil on board, 26.7 x 35.5 cm signed verso Illustrated: S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, front cover and pl.75 66

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

7. The Mouth of the Harbour, 1910 oil on board 26.2 x 35 cm signed lower left and verso Exhibited: The Scottish Colourists, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016, cat. 24 Provenance: Major Ion Harrison; Alex Reid & Lefevre, Glasgow; Fine Art Society, London and Glasgow, 1980

The Mouth of the Harbour comes from the collection of Ion Harrison, a Glasgow shipping magnate and the preeminent collector of the Colourists. He had several Royan pictures, recognising their significance in the artist’s oeuvre and British painting. These panels were some of the works Peploe brought back to Edinburgh in 1911, home to try to raise the funds to support the family in Paris. Writing to Margaret after he had unpacked he ‘felt like a millionaire’ and went on to say, “I am awfully satisfied with these Royan sketches. My old stuff was getting loose and chaotic. I really think I am getting somewhere better… I have no further interest in my old things – beautiful but limited. I must make others feel the same.”

The inner harbour at Royan is tidal; dry at low tide. In this picture the artist sits on the promenade looking across to the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater. The sun is setting, suffusing the sky, sea and sand with soft rainbow colours. The light from the lighthouse is reflected in five yellow marks across the low water. Three boats offer visual interest and colour in the sails, real and reflected. Greens, mauve and pink recall earlier choices, for example The White Dress (cat. 4), but are intensified.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Royan, 1910 oil on board, 26.7 x 35.5 cm signed lower right Exhibited: S. J. Peploe, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2012 Provenance: Private collection Illustrated: S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl.77; S. J. Peploe, National Galleries of Scotland, 2012, pl.41 70

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Île-de-Bréhat, Brittany, 1911 oil on canvas board, 33 x 40.5 cm signed lower right Exhibited: S. J. Peploe, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1985, cat.55; New Acquisitions, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, January 2007, cat.3; S. J. Peploe: Scotland’s First Modernist, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2012 Provenance: Private collection Illustrated: S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl.87

Peploe visited the Île-de-Bréhat in the summer of 1911. It is a small island three kilometres off the north Brittany coast, not far from the fishing village of Paimpol. The island is reached by a fishing boat ferry, has one hotel and a few holiday cottages. Peploe made perhaps only a half-dozen works here, all on the larger canvas boards bought from the Paris American Art Co. in Montparnasse, and which he used again in Cassis in 1913. These few works are an advance from the previous year in Royan. The solid, four-square buildings and rocks lend themselves well to a more structured treatment than the marina and seafront of Royan while the brilliant oranges of Royan are now tempered by intense, maritime aquamarines.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Boat of Garten, c.1929 (detail) oil on canvas, 58.4 x 76.3 cm signed lower right Private collection 74

“In his later years Peploe was happiest when painting landscapes. But it was both a joy and a torment. His invariable habit of working direct from nature gave his eye the opportunity to act as an instrument peculiarly sensitive to subtly changing and interacting nuances of colour and tone, and provided also the most satisfying challenge of wresting order and balance from the wonderful chaos of nature; and this demanded humility to nature, intimacy with it and power over it.”

The Landscape

Denis Peploe, 1953, S. J. Peploe, Scottish Committee of the Arts Council

The Landscape

“At the age of twenty… reading Carlisle and Ruskin, was ‘awakened’ to Art. (A nice, easy out-of-doors life).” This light-hearted excerpt from a scribbled autobiography written in 1928 (see inside back cover) speaks to the painter’s identity as located out of doors, in the landscape. Walking and looking with a sketchbook in his pocket, he was always on the look-out for a subject to which he could return with his painting-box. He walked with a long, springy stride – in his youth walking to Jedburgh in a day; he felt at home communing with nature, making a connection. He was not a religious man but had a spiritual feeling which accommodated the idea of God but was perhaps nearer to pantheism. On a summer solstice on Iona he composed his Ode to the Elementals to be recited at an ancient site for friends and family. There is nothing to suggest that this event was anything other than heartfelt and genuine. Peploe in the landscape is a more instinctive, emotional painter. In the studio, particularly with still life, his intellectual rigour was as much in the setting up and careful adjustment of the elements, as in committing to painting. In front of the landscape, responding to the immediacy of the light, weather, time of day, and local colour, he allows the emotional, instinctive side of his nature to come forward. After painting in the summer dusk in North Berwick in

1903 he wrote of how he felt his hand had been guided – his skills had of course been so honed that he had the license to paint automatically. However, the sense of communion with the subject was deeply felt. Peploe was a very fine pianist and music was always important to him and his late paintings of great trees seem to invite musical analogies. Stanley Cursiter, his first biographer, fellow painter and first Director of the National Galleries of Scotland wrote, “At an early stage it has been suggested that Bach’s Inventions and Fugues (music in which Peploe was particularly interested) can offer an analogy which is helpful in trying to explain the colour patterns of certain pictures by Peploe, such as the skilfully contrived flower-pieces in which each flower is relieved against a background of contrasting colour so that all the colour contrasts are explored within a prescribed range of chromatic steps… In these pictures of 1930 and later it is no longer Bach of whom one thinks but rather of Brahms – with his rich volume of tone and velvety shadows, and the rich melody of easy-flowing grace rising for a moment from the orchestral texture.” On Iona, where he was a yearly summer visitor from 1919 until his death in 1935, we see how his subject changed from the distinctive rocks and features of the

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

north end, to a broader beach and sky subject, more to do with weather rather than the analysis of the rock formations, perhaps reflecting a mellowing towards a softer more essentially romantic vision of landscape. A similar movement can be detected in the studio – jazz-age primary colour moderating to a more sonorous, tonal palette by the late twenties. Peploe exhibited in the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in March 1931 when the French State bought Le Foret, painted the previous summer in the woods round Shambellie House near Dumfries. These works, along with trees painted in Cassis, Antibes, Perthshire and Rothiemurchus form a rich, late subject group with his most monumental forest painting: Boat of Garten, one of the works acquired by Robert Wemyss Honeyman from The Scottish Gallery exhibition in March 1930. The majesty of mature trees became his most compelling subject in nature. Here the Scots pines of the great Caledonian Forest are lent a sense of scale, awe, and majesty without parallel in Scottish painting.

Trees at Douglas Hall, c.1915 oil on panel, 40.5 x 32 cm signed lower right and inscribed with title verso Private collection

F. C. B. Cadell, Iona, c.1929

Sam and Willy Peploe, c.1914

S. J. Peploe at family picnic, Kirkcudbright, c.1924

Margaret, Willy, Denis and Katie (their Hebridean nanny), c.1919

F. C. B. Cadell, Mrs Penny, Jean Cadell, Captain Penny, Margaret, Denis and S. J. Peploe, Cassis, c.1924 78

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Sam and Willy, Iona, c.1925

S. J. Peploe, Beatrice Huntington and William Macdonald, c.1924

Sam, Denis and Margaret at Iona, c.1925

S. J. Peploe, Denis and Margaret, Iona, c.1925

S. J. Peploe, Margaret and Cadell with friends, Iona, c.1925

Edinburgh from Murrayfield, c.1903 oil on panel, 16 x 24 cm signed lower left, inscribed on verso Provenance: Private collection, Edinburgh

The painting box, or pochard, allowed Peploe to walk to find his subject throughout his life. He had at least four different sizes, the size of box determining the size of panel. This small work was made with the box he favoured most in the years from 1900–1907, in Scotland and France. The subject is unique in his oeuvre, the view of Edinburgh from Murrayfield golf course. The course was opened in 1896, initially just twelve holes but quickly extended to eighteen. In 1904 James Braid and Harry Vardon, who between them had come first or second in the previous nine Open Championships, played an exhibition match to a gallery of several thousand. The view seems to be from halfway down the eighteenth fairway and features The Castle and the monument on Calton Hill beyond. He has used a grey, mauve ground to work on and the sky is a lighter grey with a touch of purple. Notes of white, Prussian blue and red enliven a palette made up of different shades of green and deep blue greens for the trees. Two golfers lower right move down the hill, one with a brilliant note of scarlet in their dress. What is most striking is the technique. The whole picture is made with short, up-and-down brush strokes, no single horizontal mark allowed, so that

the topography, essentially accurate, is not drawn but made up of broken colour in an Impressionist blaze. But it is not the careful use of complementary colour we associate with the Impressionism of Monet and post-Impressionism of Signac, but an instinctive, expressionism much closer to Van Gogh where the energy in the paint is as much the subject as the method or ostensive subject. It can be observed that Peploe experimented with many approaches to landscape, typically responding to the particular character of the subject, coming close to Constable, the Barbizon School and Sisley in this early period. The freedom he deployed here and in Barra in 1903 is also reflected in his studio practice, particularly when he moved to the Raeburn Studio in 1905 and when he spent the summer months in northern France with Fergusson. It was only when he moved to Paris in 1910 that the newest dimension of pure, unmodulated colour, was added to this practice, his approach otherwise brilliantly apparent in this small masterpiece.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

The North End, Iona, c.1920 oil on panel, 41 x 46 cm signed lower right Provenance: Private collection Illustrated: S. J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl.132

At the beginning of 1923 Peploe contributed 23 works to an exhibition at the prestigious Leicester Galleries in London alongside Cadell and Hunter, henceforth referred to as The Scottish Colourists. Ten of these were of a new subject: Iona. He will have likely visited the island before the Great War, but his visit in the summer of 1920 was significant and would lead him to return most years until his death in 1935. He stayed on the Atlantic side near Port Bahn, and Cadell and John Duncan were also on the island. He wrote to Margaret and the boys, who had gone to South Uist: “Cadell has a nice house. He has got his man out and means to use him as a model. He has been very nice to me. I have dined with him I think four times already. He has done a few sketches and got other big things started but so far sold nothing. Nor has Duncan, who is rather depressed about the weather keeping him from working… Where I stay is about two miles from anywhere. I come home from dining with Cadell after 11 o’clock, crossing a large machair which would not be easy if he didn’t lend me his electric torch. The most

beautiful part of the island is the north end: white sands and beautiful rocks, looking across to Mull; but it is too far from where I am.” Peploe was undoubtedly back in Iona the following summer, staying nearer the north end which provided all the inspiration he needed to work very hard. His first choice for subject was the massive craggy rocks, including the distinctive Cathedral rocks which emerge from the white sands. The pink hued rock, defined with decisive dark lines, has an architectural stature. Sometimes there is a view to the Island of Storms and Mull beyond or as here to the Treshnish Isles on a high horizon over blue green waters. As his vision mellowed and a greater naturalism appeared, weather became as much the subject as the topography, but the intensity of colour he observed in the waters of the Sound of Iona in bright sunshine, varying over reefs in the shallows and sand bars, darkening out to the deep blue of the Atlantic provided endless subject matter.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

8. Blairfettie, Perthshire, 1933–34 oil on canvas, 41 x 46 cm signed lower right Provenance: Private collection, Edinburgh

This painting is titled on the stretcher in Margaret Peploe’s hand: Blairfettie, Perthshire, 1933/34. In August of 1933 the Peploes spent some days as guests of Louie Sinclair at Blairfettie near Calvine in Highland Perthshire. Alexander Garden Sinclair was a decade older than Peploe and he occupied a studio in the Albert Building in Shandwick Place in the nineties at the same time as Peploe; he died in 1930. His widow was also a painter and a sympathetic, convivial woman who had a good understanding of what the artist needed. Peploe returned the next month and made a few late summer paintings, of which this is perhaps the preeminent example. His subject is the dark, green black

trees, remnants of the ancient Caledonian Forest and a dusty, pink yellow road passing through. The painting has a complexity and gravitas that once again has a rich musical timbre, but the hillside glimpsed through the forest and the sky of scudding cloud and brilliant blue revealed, creates a fresh optimistic atmosphere. He determined to return the next summer and did but found the road had been tarmacked and he made no more work. Consigned from the artist’s family, this work is likely to be his last landscape and a clear proof of the ambition that still drove the artist forward; a poignant indication of what might have come next.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Drawings

Drawing

There is a family story of how Sam Peploe used to draw a pig, blindfold, without lifting the pen from the paper, before putting in the tail with a flourish. Drawing was enormously important to him; the cutting edge of his skill, and he practised incessantly. He filled sketchbooks as he combed the countryside looking for subjects. The drawings which are preparatory for paintings, are very often framed on the page, with his pencil or conté pen, to suit a format of canvas or board, and there might be several sketches on a page. Although no very early work survives, it is known that Peploe drew all his life. In the early 1890s he worked with pastel on coloured paper, describing a farmyard, a girl at a dressing table, or Newhaven fisherwives, as in a splendid drawing in the Kirkcaldy Collection. These rare works are suggestive of an earlier period influenced by Whistler. His first exhibited work, prosaically titled Charcoal Drawing, in the Glasgow Institute in 1896, shows that from the start he saw fit to exhibit drawings. His first two Exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery, in 1903 and then in 1909, included as many drawings as paintings. He would carry a sketchbook with him wherever he went making quick, sharply observant drawings of street life in Edinburgh and Paris. With a few deft strokes of his conté he could capture the essence of a moment, or the character of a stranger. Fergusson famously drew the midinettes, the girls wearing the hats from their workplaces out to the café. In Parisian Café (cat. 22) Peploe describes such a girl perhaps, with a wine glass, an extravagant hat in the busy backdrop of a street café. They are drawings vitally of their period, created by an artist at one with a milieu, immersed in the vibrant café society of Paris before the First World War. Peploe loved to draw women. The excitement of drawing from life has been a driving inspiration for artists since the Renaissance and this force is communicated in Peploe’s

nudes. He worked fast, changing the model’s pose after each sketch, capturing the tension of an extended back, or twisting neck obsessed by the infinite variety of the body’s posture. These drawings are the record of Peploe exercising his heart; filling his lungs and breathing out. If Peploe took inspiration from life-drawing he also had a lifelong fascination with women as models, elegantly attired, behatted, sometimes with the suggestion of an interior as a backdrop. There is a strength in these women, sometimes sexy, sometimes challenging, always invested with palpable character. Peploe described himself in his passport as “Painter in Oils” but he could handle watercolour and sometimes used a delicate thin wash, as in the two early monochromatic studies Boy (cat. 10) and Tilly Getting Ready for Outdoors (cat. 11). He has added a wash of colour to A Flower Stall, Paris (cat. 12), to telling effect. In a series of highly evocative sketches of Paris shown at the Stafford Gallery in London in 1912, to great critical acclaim, he used a combination of black conté and oil colour on paper. Peploe never dated drawings and we rarely date them according to paintings. Some of the character of his drawing is constant; the sinuous suggestive line, the powerful diagonal hatching, the tight compositions are apparent from the earliest to the last. Design (cat. 24) probably dates from c.1912 when Peploe was working closely with J. D. Fergusson in Paris and may well have been ideas for the cross-media magazine Rhythm edited by Fergusson. We can guess the age of Peploe in the self-portrait (cat. 9) to be about 48 and date the drawing to about 1924; it is a face of a modern man, in control of his destiny, with the maturity of his artistic life ahead of him.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

9. Double Self Portrait, c.1924 conté drawing on paper, 32.4 x 23 cm 89

10. Boy, c.1893 watercolour on paper, 26.2 x 18.6 cm 90

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

11. Tilly Getting Ready for Outdoors, c.1893 watercolour on paper, 26.2 x 18.6 cm 91

12. A Flower Stall, Paris, c.1912 charcoal and watercolour on buff paper, 14 x 21 cm signed with initials lower right Provenance: The Artist’s family; Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow In the years before WWI, in Edinburgh and Paris, Peploe made drawings with conté and colour washes. These were intended for exhibition, unlike his working drawings, and are eloquent examples of the artist’s economy and powers of observation. In A Flower Stall, Paris an aproned woman and the street vendor converse over his barrow while a pair of gendarmes pass by, distinctive in grey coats, gold epaulettes and kepis. The flower seller is described in four decisive lines of conté crayon and the colour notes for the flowers, apron and gendarmes add sensory detail, locating the drawing in its moment.

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

13. Margaret in a Hat, c.1907 conté drawing on paper, 26 x 19 cm signed lower right 94

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

14. Margaret, 1912 conté drawing on paper, 17.5 x 11 cm inscribed lower right Exhibited: The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004 95

15. Margaret Sipping Wine, 1910 conté drawing on paper, 19.4 x 15 cm signed with initials lower left

16. Reading, 1913 conté drawing on paper, 22.8 x 20.2 cm 96

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

17. Downward Look, c.1910 conté drawing on paper, 21.4 x 14.6 cm signed lower right 97

18. Resting, 1925 conté drawing on paper, 26 x 22 cm signed lower right 98

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

19. Study for Portrait of a Girl, Red Bandeau, c.1912 conté drawing on paper, 27 x 21 cm signed lower left

Peploe used a new model during and after the Great War: Poppy Lowe. She was another active, engaging model, who sat for numerous artists including Stanley Cursiter. Peploe’s only known sculpture, a small modelled head, is of Poppy and we are happy to include several drawings where the model wears a headscarf, which is a preparatory drawing for the striking Modernist portrait Red Bandeau. 99

20. The Artist’s Sister, c.1903 conté drawing on paper, 11.6 x 9 cm

21. Profile, 1909 conté drawing on paper, 21 x 14 cm signed lower left 100

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

22. Parisian Café, 1909 conté drawing on paper, 21.4 x 13 cm

23. A Sharp Look, c.1911 conté drawing on paper, 21 x 13 cm signed with initials lower right 101

24. Design, c.1912 charcoal and ink on paper, 15 x 12.2 cm In 1911 and 1912 Peploe made a small number of abstract ‘design’ drawings in ink, and one or two with colour. They may well have been ideas for illustration for Rhythm, the art periodical published in London and Paris for two years before the Great War for which J. D. Fergusson was art editor and which included work by Picasso, Derain, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Fergusson and Peploe.

102

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

103

25. Royan, c.1910 ink drawing on paper, 21.2 x 14 cm 104

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

26. Still Life Study, c.1911 ink drawing on paper, 22.8 x 15.8 cm 105

27. Seated Pose, c.1924 conté drawing on paper, 29 x 20 cm signed lower left

28. Standing Nude, c.1930 conté drawing on paper, 32.6 x 21.4 cm signed lower left 106

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

29. Nude Study, 1930 conté drawing on paper, 31.5 x 23 cm signed lower middle

30. Seated Nude, c.1930 conté drawing on paper, 32 x 22.6 cm signed lower left 107

31. Pensive Girl, c.1922 conté drawing on paper, 16.6 x 20 cm

32. Interior, The Raeburn Chair, c.1920 conté drawing on paper, 20.8 x 16.2 cm 108

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

33. Hands in her Lap, c.1908 conté drawing on paper, 26 x 19 cm signed lower right

34. Poppy, 1928 conté drawing on paper, 17 x 17 cm signed with initials lower right 109

110

Legacy

111

112

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Legacy

Peploe died aged only sixty-four, saying before the operation on his thyroid, from which he would not recover, that if he had another ten years he might do something decent. He left a widow and two sons, launching themselves on the world. The elder, Willy, had read History at Magdalen Oxford and began a career as an art dealer with Bignou in Paris and then Reid & Lefevre in London. Denis was taking his diploma in Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art. Memorial exhibitions came in Edinburgh and Glasgow and the major private collectors continued to buy from the dealers. Stanley Cursiter did much, writing his book after the War and before this as Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, acquiring significant works for the nation, and organising a number of exhibitions. The War intervened and the show in 1941 focussing on The Colourists, did much to fly the flag for a European facing Scottish Modernism. In the last two years of his life, Peploe taught senior students at Edinburgh College of Art including Wilhelmina BarnsGraham and Margaret Mellis. There was much in his professionalism and generosity as well as the direct links to the crucible of modern painting in Paris before the War, to make him an inspiration to the next generation of Scottish painters. Gillies and MacTaggart had exhibited with Peploe in the Society of Eight and SSA. His great friend F. C. B. Cadell did not much outlive him, but J. D. Fergusson, that paragon of Bohemian life, continued to be the grand old man of Scottish art when he returned to Glasgow from Paris at the outbreak of war, inspiring many independently minded artists. The belle peinture of the Edinburgh School, best exemplified by Anne Redpath and even the expressive honesty of Joan Eardley has part of their origins in Peploe. Painting inspired by the natural world, modified by intellect but led by love and integrity will persist as fashions come and go. In the fifties a new curatorial

class began to assert novelty, always a vital if unstable ingredient in art, and the thirties quickly seemed a strange, lost time. By the sixties and seventies art was atomised and qualities like beauty and longevity were declared irrelevant. However, in this century reappraisal and even rediscovery have flourished, and it can be noted that a painting like Boat of Garten (p.74–75) can entirely escape the harsh judgments which have to be passed on so much dated, hollow art of the last quarter of the 20th century. Of course, the modest charms which sometimes transform into greatness in Peploe are vulnerable to a metropolitan commentary which assumes that any easel painting, apart from Bacon and Freud, is derivative and commercial, especially if, heaven forfend, it is made outside London. When Jack Blyth, who eventually owned eighty-four Peploes, organised a Scottish Art show at the Royal Academy in 1939, supported by the young, influential dealer Lilian Browse, he might have been shocked to know that it would be another sixty years before the SNGMA Scottish Colourist Exhibition would bring the work of Peploe back to the Academy. And he would have been horrified that the show would extract ill-informed, careless nastiness from Brian Sewell and other London-based reviewers. There were missed opportunities before this, particularly when Peploe and Fergusson’s omission from the RA’s British Art of the 20th Century was part of a thorough Scot-wash. Today however, with two hundred works held in British public collections alone and renewed support from the recent dazzling shows at the SNGMA showcasing The Colourists, Peploe can be seen as a national icon, a great of British 20th century painting. Now regularly included in Christies and Sothebys ‘Mod Brit’ high value evening sales and, thanks to enlightened continental curators, included in any appraisal of the vital early 20th century Europe-wide Expressionist movement.

113

Self-Portrait: Painting in Devon Place Studio, Edinburgh, c.1902 charcoal and chalk on paper, 46.5 x 30 cm signed lower left Private collection 114

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Denis and Willy Peploe, photographed by S. J. Peploe, Iona, c.1923 Denis, ‘painting’, Iona, c.1923

Sam and Denis, George Street, Edinburgh, c.1934

Willy, Denis and Mrs Pyatt, Edinburgh, c.1934

S. J. Peploe and his students, Edinburgh College of Art, Easter 1934 115

S. J. PEPLOE’S STUDIO LIFE AT 150

Selected UK Collections Abbot Hall Cartwright Hall Art Gallery City Art Centre Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh Ferens Art Gallery Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (GMRC) Gracefield Arts Centre Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum Kirkcaldy Gallery Laing Art Gallery Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries Lillie Art Gallery Manchester Art Gallery McLean Museum and Art Gallery Middlesbrough Institute Modern Art (mima) National Galleries of Scotland, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art National Galleries of Scotland, Scottish National Portrait Gallery National Trust for Scotland, Brodie Castle National Trust for Scotland, Culzean Castle, Garden and Country Park National Trust for Scotland, Greenbank Garden National Trust for Scotland, Hermiston Quay Paisley Museum and Art Galleries Pallant House Gallery Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture Rozelle House Galleries The Burrell Collection The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust) The Fitzwilliam Museum The Fleming Collection The Stewartry Museum Ulster Museum University of Aberdeen University of Edinburgh Wardlaw Museum William Morris Gallery

S. J. Peploe, c.1920 117

S. J. Peploe S. J. PEPLOE by Guy Peploe Published by Lund Humphries Price: £35.00; 192 pages S. J. Peploe, published by Lund Humphries, was fully-revised and expanded in 2012. There are 160 colour images and extensive use of family archives of letters and photographs which lends insight into the life of one of Scotland’s best loved painters. The text attempts to place him in the complex development of art which forms the emergence of Modernism in the early years of the 20th century as well as tell the story of a painter’s life with all its minor triumphs and setbacks. Guy Peploe is a grandson of the artist as well as a Director of The Scottish Gallery, where Peploe had his first exhibition in 1903. The Scottish Gallery has designed a new jacket cover to mark the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth. Grandson of S. J. Peploe, Guy Peploe, Director of The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, is a specialist in 20th Century Scottish Art and is the acknowledged expert on his grandfather’s work and The Scottish Colourists. He has written and lectured extensively on Scottish Art. He is currently working on the catalogue raisonné for S. J. Peploe.

Portrait of Guy Peploe by David Eustace, photographed at the Raeburn Studio, 32 York Place, Edinburgh, 2020 118

Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition S. J. PEPLOE (1871–1935) S. J. Peploe’s Studio Life at 150 30 September – 23 October 2021 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/sjpeploe ISBN: 978-1-912900-41-1 Produced, researched, and edited by Christina Jansen, The Scottish Gallery Designed by Kenneth Gray Photography by John McKenzie and John Glynn Photography Printed by Pureprint Group 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.

Cover: Tulips and Fruit, c.1919, oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm Back cover: The Lobster, c.1901, oil on canvas, 41 x 51 cm (detail) Cover inside jacket – front: Académie Julian, 1893. Robert Brough is numbered 43 and Peploe 41 at back right of group Cover inside jacket – back: Photograph of the memorial exhibition of paintings by S. J. Peploe, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, Feb 1937 120

S. J. Peploe was a great man, his pictures are the ardent outpourings of a great heart and a great mind – to live with them is a sheer delight. J W Blyth, 1936

S.J. Peploe's Studio Life at 150 | October 2021 | The Scottish Gallery

Articles inside

The Landscape

Legacy

Still Life

The Models

The Colourist

Foreword