Samuel John Peploe, R.S.A. 1871-1935

There is some speculation regarding where the lush landscape of trees depicted on one side of the present picture, was painted. It relates to an almost identical composition entitled La Fôret (Galerie des Artes Modernes, Pompidou Centre, Paris) which was exhibited under the title Paysage in the show les peintres écossais organised by Reid & Lefevre and held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1931. It has has recently been suggested that this picture was painted during the summer of 1929 in the woods around the home of Peploe's friend Ted Stewart, Shambellie House near Kirkcudbright. However, Stanley Cursiter states that La Fôret was painted in Cassis in 1928 which would explain why the French State Collection purchased the picture from the 1931 exhibition. Interestingly, one of the ten pictures in this exhibition was entitled Nature Morte, Panier et Pommes (Still Life, Basket of Apples).

Peploe was a great Francophile and loved the South of France particularly in his later years. It was here that he felt most relaxed and found inspiration in the natural world around him. At Cassis he stayed at the delightfully eccentric hotel Panorama where the proprietor Monsieur Bresson was always at hand to make his famous omelets to be washed down with notably fine Cassis wine. The hotel looked out over an azure bay where little white boats bobbed on the placid waters and glimpses of the town's harbour could be seen from some of the windows. Bresson had designed and built the hotel himself and adapted it to capture as many beautiful views as possible and this of course appealed greatly to Peploe who was always searching for a view to paint. The odd little building was nestled among the forested slopes of the hillside where Peploe painted some of his most remarkable landscapes '... full of light and colour... the olive groves and the sea shimmering through foliage.' (Stanley Cursiter, Peploe, An Intimate Memoir of an Artist and of his Work, 1947, pp.61) 

La Fôret and Les Arbres are part of a series of pictures painted in France during this enchanted summer of 1929; '... when he painted some excellent pictures. He was at the peak of his career and in good condition physically... it [the south of France] suited his mood, and his pictures reflect his complete accord with his environment... The remaining weeks spent in France were marked by many fine pictures of subjects in and around Cassis, all painted with complete mastery and the happiest inspiration.' (ibid Cursiter, pp.60-61)

In his description of the pictures exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit, Cursiter remarked upon the maturity of Peploe's style; '... his work had a still greater richness and fullness due in great measure to an increased acceptance of the muted harmonies of quieter and more broken colour. There was no longer the slightest suggestion that the colour was being searched for and accentuated for its own sake, but rather that the whole picture surface was a web of some rich material in which notes of colour emerge and forms take shape. This continuity of colour content seems to give to his work in these years the broad, flowing depth which one feels in orchestral music.' (ibid Cursiter, p.76) This richness and confidence in handling was greatly inspired by Cezanne and whilst in France Peploe could not help but recall the lush landscapes and still lives painted by the Impressionist during his time there. The influence of Cezanne is evident in the refracted light shimmering upon the leaves and casting shadows across the trunks and boughs of the trees. The paint is applied with impasto and with rapidly interwoven patches of colour which contrasts with the angularity of Peploe's views in Iona painted around the same time.

The still life of apples painted on the reverse of the present painting is far from inferior to the landscape and equally demonstrates Peploe's mature style. It appears to have been painted around the same time as the landscape and is reminiscent of Pewter Jug and Pears of 1928 (private collection) which also has a Cassis landscape painted on its reverse. The reuse of both sides of the canvas may have been due to the lack of availability of large canvases in Cassis.

Throughout his career Peploe strove to paint the perfect still life and he got nearest to this ideal in the late 1920s. It had been his first love and his first serious achievements had been in still life. His temperament made him ideally suited to the task. His calm reasoning and thoughtful manner enabled him to make a careful analysis of the problems which face the still life painter and he set about resolving them in a series of works which includes many of his most satisfying paintings. In a letter written to a fellow artist he said,  “There is so much in mere objects, flowers, leaves, Jugs, what not- colours, forms, relation- I can never see mystery coming to an end” (ibid Cursiter, p.73). His series of still lifes can be viewed as sequential steps along a path to sought after perfection, they can be seen as stimulating and highly individual. Peploe regarded them as serious works, requiring a considered intellectual effort allied to a careful hand and a sure sense of colour and pattern.  Peploe’s contribution to the genre of still life painting is probably without equal in British art in the twentieth century. Walter Sickert, who had been invited by Alexander Reid to write an introduction to the catalogue of the 1925 exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London, had a high opinion of these new paintings. He commented “In his earlier work Mr Peploe had carried on a certain kind of delicious skill to a pitch of virtuosity that might have led to mere repetition, and his present orientation has certainly been a kind of rebirth. He has transferred his unit of attention from attenuated and exquisite gradations of tone to no less skilfully related colour. And by relating all his lines with frankness to 180 degrees of two right angles, he is able to capture and digest a wider field of vision than before. And time, as the poet sings, is an important element in the gathering of roses. And it is probably for this reason that, obviously beautiful as was Mr Peploe’s earlier quality, his present one will establish itself as the more beautiful of the two”.

More than any other member of the Colourists Peploe was influenced by the radical work of the Cubists and Fauves and he developed a way of a painting more closely akin to that of Cezanne with his bold colour and delineated tone. Peploe’s still lifes produced in the 1920s investigated the possibilities of artistic expression in terms of pure colour and flattened pictorial space. His work is not concerned with clever representations of distance or of light, there is no meaning to be read into the symbolism of the objects chosen for his pictures or deep-rooted psychological mystery to his work.