Samuel John Peploe, R.S.A.

Alex. Reid & Lefevre, Glasgow;
Private Collection

The panel is sound. There is a small spot of loss to the top layer of paint, at the extreme lower centre edge. Otherwise in good overall condition. Held in a simple moulded frame with a light layer of red and blue paint. No visiblke retouching under Ultraviolet light.
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Cassis captured Samuel John Peploe's imagination ever since his first visit to the idyllic village between Marseille and Toulon in 1913, when he and his family stayed with John Duncan Fergusson and Anne Estelle Rice. As Elizabeth Cumming highlights, in discovering the charms of this region the Colourists were "consciously following in the steps of the French Fauves: since 1905 Matisse, Derain, Marquet and Manguin had all spent the summer with Braque at La Ciotat, visiting Derain at Cassis." Cumming further identifies that in discovering the Cote d'Azur as a source of subject matter, a "French attitude was absorbed into the identity of each artist, infusing their work with new colour, tonal values and use of line. The colour inherent in the landscape affected the Scots in different ways." Peploe and Cadell, she observes, "produced strong, semi-abstracted views of the town in which form and shadow are marked out equally in flat colour areas, very much in a 'French' style."

The harbour at Cassis was a perfect subject for Peploe with its quaint three-story buildings with brilliant white-painted facades and red-tiled roofs which lined the harbour front, accentuated by the extraordinary clarity of light that so attracted him. In addition this deep-water harbour was able to accommodate quite sizeable schooners which gave him ample excuse to paint the brightly coloured sailing boats within this wonderfully picturesque setting. These elements also enabled Peploe's important exploration of perspective. The multitude of masts, rigging and the boughs of the boats as observed in the current painting, create clear lines of symmetry which give the work an inherent and natural sense of structure.

The current work is comparable in subject and date to The Harbour, Cassis which was formerly part of the Hunter Blair Collection at Blairquhan Castle. Whilst the composition is similar, the present work displays a far bolder and more varied palette as well as a wider panoramic viewpoint. The top edge of the central boat's bough is rendered with two or three supremely confident strokes of bright green paint, providing the primary horizontal axis in the lower foreground. The masts, presented in orange, yellow, green and mauve, intersect and overlap providing a network of vertical and diagonal axes around which the central composition is carefully poised. In masterfully meandering his way through a wide spectrum of colour, Peploe demonstrates "a new language with which he can move his viewer by revealing the potential drama in the very ordinariness of his subjects." (Guy Peploe, p.52)