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

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.”

Stanley Cursiter, S. J. Peploe, National Gallery of Scotland, March 1941 Still Life with Bottle, c.1912 oil on canvas, 51 x 51 cm signed lower right Private collection

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.

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

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

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.

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

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