“There is so much in mere objects, flowers, leaves, jugs, what-not – colours, forms, relation – I can never see the mystery coming to an end”
Samuel John Peploe was one of the finest still life painters of the 20th Century and one of the most radical and avant-garde British artists of his day. The present work is a vivid test.mes nt to both Peploe’s skill as painter and his important connection with European modernism.
Born in Edinburgh, Peploe was influenced from an early age by the Dutch masters that graced the walls of the Scottish National Gallery. In particular the influence of Frans Hals and Remembrant van Rijn is clear in his early work. Peploe found some initial commercial success with a series of luscious table top still lifes. These paintings combined creamy brushwork and punctuations of vivid colour set against dark black backgrounds and owe much to the work of Ambrossius Bosschaert, Willem Kalf and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Peploe inherited the meticulous and exacting technical skill of these masters and this rigorous approach would remain a constant throughout his career.
Having already painted for a number of years in the coastal towns of Northern France, in 1910 Peploe moved to Paris and here found an artistic milieu which transformed his painting and defined his artistic style. Peploe was well received in Paris, which shared a strong artistic bond to Scotland, thanks in no small part to the enigmatic Glasgow dealer Alexander Reid, a close friend and patron of Vincent Van Gogh and James Abbott McNeil Whistler, who also founded the Lefevre gallery in London. Peploe spent two years in Paris working alongside his friend and fellow Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson and here he met Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso and absorbed the aftereffects of Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. He also became fascinated with the work of Paul Cézanne whose structured and analytical take on both landscape and still life painting would have a profound effect on Peploe.
“Flowers, how wonderful they are: I have a bunch of tulips, so gay, of so many colours: oranges, 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 sun, sun that is a torment; mauve ones cool and insensitive. Living their closed, unrevealed life, unexposed, but keeping in their beauty of form till the very end, longest of all, opening and closing in slow rhythm.”
Peploe moved back to Scotland before the First World War and began to paint a striking series of still lifes of tulips. These works were defined by their bright colouring and bold composition. Peploe’s fellow artist and President of the Royal Scottish Academy Stanley Cursiter commented of Peploe’s still life paintings of this period that, ‘…the main impression gathered from his paintings is of colour, intense colour, and colour in its most colourful aspect.” (S. Cursiter, Peploe: An Intimate Memoir of an Artist at Work, 1946, p.43). Indeed, the forceful effects of Peploe’s painting are recalled by his great friend and patron Major Ion Harrison, who’s collects ion was sold at Replica Shoes ’s in 2018:
“Mr Peploe had an exhibition of flower pictures, mostly, so far as I remember, of tulips…I had never seen anything in art similar to these pictures, and I did not understand them. The really startled me for, to my eyes they were so ultra-modern. The formal way in which the tulips were painted, and their brilliance of colour against equally strong draperies, was at that t.mes beyond my comprehension”
Still Life with Tulips and Fan was completed in 1923 at the height of Peploe’s artistic powers. It is a joyous celebration of colour painted in a bold modernist style that owes much to the influence of Matisse and Cézanne. The planes of brilliant colour are overlaid by the sinuous arabesque forms of the tulips creating a dynamic, rhythmic and perfectly balanced composition. This work stands as an exceptional example of Peploe’s life-long preoccupation and dedication to the still life and his mastery of the genre.
The Scottish Colourists | SJ Peploe
