Art reviews: Colour: The Palette of SJ Peploe | The Scottish Colourists Revealed | Florence Peake
One Colourist exhibition is a joy, two is an embarrassment of riches, writes Susan Mansfield
Colour: The Palette of SJ Peploe, Kirkcudbright Galleries ★★★★★
The Scottish Colourists Revealed, Perth Art Gallery ★★★★
Florence Peake: Your Meaning Not Your Materiality (YMNYM), Hospitalfield, Arbroath ★★★★
The Scottish Colourists continue to be the most bankable artists in the Scottish art market. And what’s not to like? Glorious colours, sun-drenched landscapes (even in Scotland), portraits from the age of elegance. It’s hard not to come away from a Colourists show feeling uplifted.
Dazzled by sunshine and colour, we might miss the degree of rigour they applied to their work. However, the major SJ Peploe show curated by Amanda Herries for Kirkcudbright Galleries, Colour: The Palette of SJ Peploe, which is part of the RSA200: Celebrating Together programme, reveals him to be a skilled and rigorous painter, a true technician in the best sense of the word.
Peploe was the oldest of the Colourists, and his friendships with Fergusson and Cadell were at the core of the group. All three were in Paris in the late 19th century when the city was the crucible for European modernism. All - to varying extents and in different ways - took what they learned from Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse and Van Gogh and made it part of their own work.
The show is organised by genre, beginning with landscape. If you’re anything like me, you’re looking for a chronology charting how the artist’s style evolved, but it’s a fool’s errand. Peploe seemed to experiment continuously: sometimes he’s outlining, then, in the same time period, making loose, semi-abstract marks which crystallise into a perfect, clear image at just the right distance.
Two tree paintings hang next to one another, both done at Douglas Hall in Dumfries and Galloway in 1915: one is pale and delicate, all Northern spring light; the other is full of rich blues, greens and pinks, the brushstrokes a touch Van Gogh, the colours Cezanne. He paints Kirkcudbright Tolbooth as if it’s in the South of France, while Stormy Weather (1929) is a dramatic, naturalistic wave study from Iona which doesn’t really look like a Colourist painting at all.
Still lifes are at the heart of Peploe’s work and here there is an evolution. At first, dark backgrounds, like the Dutch Masters, in works like The Lobster (1901). Then a shift towards flowers, and pale backgrounds full of light. Then, a gradual embracing of strong colours, balancing them often in daring ways: fauve colours, with a dash of orientalism here, a whiff of cubism there. And then, from the mid 1920s, a more muted palette led by browns and greys, less demonstrative, no less skilled. There is a full wall of these late still lifes, and they are a joy.
He was no slouch at painting the figure either. There are contrasting nudes, one from his time as a student at the RSA Life School in 1895, the other from 1929. But, really, almost every picture is a contrast: Boy Reading (William) in shades of brown and grey; luminous pastels of dancers which suggests he fell briefly under the spell of Degas; the free brushwork in a painting like The Yellow Dress or the strength of form and colour in Portait of a Girl, Red Bandeau.
At times, the show feels like it’s trying too hard in its presentation: walls decorated with blown up photographs, or painted with colours so bright they are a distraction. But the paintings? They are outstanding. They dazzle again and again, and are well worth the journey to the southern edge of Scotland.
One Colourist exhibition is a joy, two is an embarrassment of riches. The Scottish Colourists Revealed at Perth Art Gallery, supported by auction house Lyon & Turnbull and also part of RSA200: Celebrating Together, gathers a selection of works by all four artists, much of it not usually on public display.
It ranges widely across genres and themes, and there are some real highlights: Fergusson’s Three Submarines, from his time painting at Portsmouth Docks after managing to avoid conscription; ink sketches from Cadell’s Jack and Tommy series about Army and Navy life, made after failing to avoid conscription; a fine Peploe of Royan in the palest of sun-soaked tones, and a gorgeous Peploe still life from 1929, muted, delicate and perfect in its tonal balance.
At times, though, the selection seems a little random, perhaps hardly surprising with so many Peploes in Kirkcudbright and a stunning group of Fergussons hanging a couple of rooms along; for some reason, works from the bequest made by the Fergusson Trust to Perth and Kinross Council in 1991 are not included in this exhibition.
The artist who emerges as the star of this show, however, is Cadell. From The Blue Mountain, an Iona painting which has shifted into a realm of imagination and fantasy, its conical snow-capped peak more like Mt Fuji than Ben More, to Venice c.1910, full of rich reds and greens; from luminous portraits such as The Poet and Girl in Pink and White, to a still life so freely painted it almost shifts in front of your eyes, his work is captivating.
It’s a New York critic writing about George Leslie Hunter who best sums up the Colourists. While it’s difficult to look at the work and not think of Matisse, he writes, “here is a new individual palette and personality”. Were they breaking new ground? Perhaps not. But they were absorbing, critiquing, adapting the new and then being themselves - and doing it splendidly.
Hospitalfield, in Arbroath, hosts many artist residencies, but one artist each year becomes the focus of its exhibition programme. This year, that artist is Florence Peake, who spent over a month at Hospitalfield in 2024 developing a body of work which now begins an international tour.
Her central theme is loss, and these are works of absence and presence. She has cast the spaces between and around bodies, giving substance to what is usually emptiness. Her plastercasts are placed around the gardens at Hospitalfield, stark in their whiteness, like empty spaces cut out of lawn or sky. In August, Peake, whose first training was in dance, made a performance, Ode to the Dark with nine dancers from Scottish Dance Theatre. However, the sculptures have a life force of their own.
Some suggest figures very clearly, such as The Sisters, made with local sisters, Lizzie and Kelly McWilliam: the artist cast the space between the two women’s bodies as they embraced. Others appear more abstract. A collection of smaller works at the end of the garden are hand-sized, casts made by hands, or the spaces between hands.
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Inside the Picture Gallery of the historic house, she takes this idea further in Vitalities, a series of works which pair a hand-sized plastercast of negative space with a bronze cast of a hand. They sit on furniture from the Hospitalfield collection, including a table commissioned by Patrick Allan Fraser as a gift for his wife, Elizabeth.
The contrast of the two materials seems to accentuate the sense of the plaster shapes as fragile, impermanent, while the hand yearns for the permanent, the solid. Placed alongside art and sculpture from the 19th century, these works are more raw, more immediate, more witness to process than a polished work from which all traces of process has been removed. There are not a memorial, then, like the marble busts of Patrick and Elizabeth which look down upon them. It’s something more dynamic, like grief given physical form.
Colour: The Palette of SJ Peploe runs until 4 October; The Scottish Colourists Revealed until 26 October; Florence Peake: Your Meaning Not Your Materiality (YMNYM) until 4 October (open Thursday and Friday, 11am-4pm, or by appointment)
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