Works on show in The Scottish Colourist Series: SJ Peploe. Select the OPEN links to read more about a work, and select the image to enlarge it.
late 1890s
The sitter for this painting was Jeannie Blyth, a flower-seller who posed for Peploe on many occasions from the age of about fifteen until sometime after she married. Her dark colouring and lack of self-consciousness made her one of his favourite models. Gipsy shows the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch art on Peploe at this time. In 1895 or 1896 he visited Holland and returned with reproductions of paintings by Rembrandt and Frans Hals, whose work he would also have been able to see in the National Gallery of Scotland.
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about 1905
In the early 1900s Peploe began to work on a larger scale and with growing technical virtuosity. The Coffee Pot is one of his most ambitious and important paintings of the period. A sophisticated after-dinner atmosphere is suggested in the table-setting, whilst the stark contrast of white tablecloth set against a dark background is enlivened by the highlights of brilliantly coloured fruit. It was executed following Manet’s technique of first painting in light areas and then adding darks and half-tones while the paint remained wet. The silver coffee pot depicted in this work is also in the exhibition.
1910
Peploe and his fellow Scottish Colourist J. D. Fergusson spent the summer of 1910 painting at Royan, near Bordeaux, on the Atlantic coast of France. The work Peploe made there proved to be a turning-point in his career. This highly-charged painting shows how his confidence was growing in the use of bright colours in broadly-outlined compositions. Paint was applied directly from the tube and areas of the primed canvas remain visible, creating a sense of light and movement. Colour is used to delineate form, such as reds and oranges to indicate sunlit areas and cool greens and blues to denote shadow. Peploe’s first son Willy was born at Royan during this painting trip.
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about 1924
This painting is a fine example of the still lifes which Peploe painted from about 1918 to 1924, which are the works for which he is best known, partly because of the sheer number that he made and also because of their immediate and continuing commercial success. Peploe changed his technique, adopting an absorbent gesso ground and reducing the amount of medium in his paint. He pushed his use of colour to the extreme and obsessively arranged objects – such as the Chinese blue and white porcelain brush pot, fan, books, scattered fruit, fabric-draped table and background seen here – to create finely balanced compositions in some of the most successful works of his career.
1928
Peploe painted in Antibes in the south of France with Hunter in 1928. The view depicted in this work is from the Cap d'Antibes looking across to the town of Antibes - the red roofs on the horizontal centre line of the picture - with the foothills of the Alps behind Nice in the background. After Peploe had returned to Edinburgh, Hunter wrote to Tom Honeyman of Reid & Lefèvre, who represented Hunter and Peploe in Glasgow and London, complaining that the ‘short days and bad weather when out painting was difficult and almost impossible, as Peploe found.’ The brilliant sunshine depicted in Blue Water, Antibes may therefore have occurred after a Spring mistral.
![Peploe’s interest in trees as subject matter became increasingly pronounced during painting trips around Scotland’s mainland during the late 1920s, including to Boat of Garten and Rothiemurchus. Boat of Garten is in the Scottish Highlands. In this depiction of a forest glade dappled with sunlight, Peploe applied paint quickly and generously, using a palette knife as well as brushes, to capture a sense of the enduring monumentality of the trees. David Mitchell, Curator of Projects at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh has explained: ‘This work shows a remnant of the Ancient Caledonia Pine Forest, to the right is a stand of Scots pines, Pinus sylvestris…[and] at the centre is a group of birch trees, Betula pubescens.’](http://www.nationalgalleries.org/media/_source/artworks_other/P106_124.-Boat-of-Garten_.jpg)
about 1929
Peploe’s interest in trees as subject matter became increasingly pronounced during painting trips around Scotland’s mainland during the late 1920s, including to Boat of Garten and Rothiemurchus. Boat of Garten is in the Scottish Highlands. In this depiction of a forest glade dappled with sunlight, Peploe applied paint quickly and generously, using a palette knife as well as brushes, to capture a sense of the enduring monumentality of the trees. David Mitchell, Curator of Projects at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh has explained: ‘This work shows a remnant of the Ancient Caledonia Pine Forest, to the right is a stand of Scots pines, Pinus sylvestris…[and] at the centre is a group of birch trees, Betula pubescens.’
about 1930
Although Peploe is best known for his depictions of roses, he painted a variety of flowers, including lilies as seen in this work. It is a good example of Peploe’s late style, in which the finesse of his work of the early 1900s has matured to a more rigorous and summary approach.
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