The Landscape

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

“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.”

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

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

Sam and Willy Peploe, c.1914 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

Sam and Willy, Iona, c.1925 Sam, Denis and Margaret at Iona, c.1925

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

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.

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.