‘Even be Peploe’s motif a single rose, he gave to it by his significant design and colour a more enduring bloom than any yet produced by the superficial formula of academic cosmetics.’
Painted in Edinburgh in the mid-1920s, Still Life with Roses, Oranges and Apples nevertheless radiates with the colour, heat and calme, luxe et volupte of Post-Impressionism. And yet it is precisely this combination of modern French ideals with a Northern light that makes Peploe’s work so brilliant and unique: he is no mere imitator, but rather an innovator.
The apples that hold the composition in balance at the bottom left and draw the viewer’s eye into the centre, are pure Cézanne. This high-key colour is an important element in Peploe’s work – an emotional state as well as pleasing to the eye - which is always countered, though, by a cooling white light. This light is Peploe’s rendering of luxe – a clarity that takes us all the way back to the Latin root of the word, light – and entirely appropriate for his life as an Edinburgh artist, reinterpreting French Modernism for thoroughly modern Scots.
Peploe had arrived in Paris in 1910, having already spent a number of years painting in the coastal towns of Northern France – and his timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Picasso’s Desmoiselles D’Avignon was just three years old and Matisse’s The Red Studio was likely already on the great maitre’s easel; and the city itself was alive with possibilities of what it meant to be modern and of what painting could be, in the new age of photography. Thanks in no small part to the enigmatic Glasgow dealer Alexander Reid, a close friend and patron of Van Gogh and Whistler, Peploe was well received in Paris and spent two years there, working alongside his friend John Duncan Fergusson. Both artists drew deeply from Post-Impressionism and Fauvism: the former gave them structure and technique; the latter the thrill of pure colour set free from nature.
By the mid-1920s, Peploe was at the height of both his powers and reputation – and Still Life with Roses, Oranges and Apples is the perfect representation of this state of affairs. Like all of his best paintings the composition is an essay in harmony and balance, the brushwork is effortless and sophisticated, yet retains that uncultured feel so beloved of the Fauves; it is both a traditional painting yet intensely, self-consciously modern – the various elements arranged to articulate the formal confines of the canvas. It is a painting that speaks to the joy of studio life for the modern artist, where everyday things become part of a life less ordinary.