SCOTTISH COLOURISTS
Born in Edinburgh on 27 January 1871,
Samuel Peploe was the eldest of the Scottish
Colourists. He studied at the Royal Scottish
Academy Schools and several Parisian
academies, and his lifelong ambition was to
paint a perfect still life. However, for Peploe,
while he would painstakingly revise a potential
composition on his studio table, moving and
tweaking objects until they were just so, he
was also firmly against rendering the resulting
picture with a dry precision; instead he put
great effort into making his paintings look
effortless. The bold and colourful influence of
Manet is widely noted on the early career of
Peploe – and indeed all of his fellow Scottish
Colourists – yet a formative trip to the
Netherlands in his early 20s also proved key.
He returned with reproductions of works by
Rembrandt and Frans Hals, two earlier Dutch
painters who prized the buttery quality of oil
paints applied in a deft, almost casually
brilliant way.
The drawbacks to painting with such a
flourish and chasing a bolder finish are that
accuracy is sacrificed and mistakes could
easily occur. Luckily, Peploe wasn’t
sentimental and thought nothing of wiping
away a seemingly almost complete painting if
he felt like parts had become lifeless and
overworked.
In the first decade of the new century,
Peploe often spent time painting with John
Duncan Fergusson in Paris and along the
French coast, after the latter had emigrated
frustrated with the rigour of academic art
teaching back home. He fully immersed
himself in French life, mingling with the likes of
Picasso and Matisse in Parisian cafés,
teaching at the Academie de la Palette and
exhibiting at the fashionable artistic salons. In
1911, he became art editor of a journal
named Rhythm, named after a collection of
nudes that he was working on at the time.
He only returned to Scotland in 1939, after
which he became the founding president of
the New Scottish Group in Glasgow and would
go on to outlive the other three Colourists by
more than two decades, finally passing away
in 1961. Fergusson’s love of the American
Impressionist artist James McNeill Whistler
was shared by his fellow Colourist, Francis
LEFT JD Fergusson,
The Blue Lamp,
1912, oil on panel,
6 6 x 57. 2 c m
FAR LEFT
JD Fergusson,
Rhythm, 1911,
oil on canvas,
163.2x114.3cmCITY ART CENTRE/CITY OF EDINBURGH MUSEUMS AND ART GALLERIES/UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING ART COLLECTION