Anne Redpath, R.S.A., A.R.A.

Edinburgh, Aitken Dott & Son, Festival Exhibition, 1954, cat. no. 8

Anne Redpath was a painter whose career truly reached a crescendo in the latter half of her life. During the years of early marriage and motherhood spent in France, she produced very little work and instead chose to concentrate her time and efforts on her young family. Only on her return to Scotland in 1934, with her children in school and a financial incentive to earn money at a time when her husband struggled to provide for the family, did Redpath return to her painting with full gusto.

By the 1950s, Redpath was living in Edinburgh and enjoying a reputation shared by few other contemporary Scottish, and particularly female painters. She was elected the first woman painter R.S.A in 1952 and had her first solo show at The Lefevre Gallery in London the same year. Her highly respected opinion and academic approach were acknowledged by the Arts Council who asked her to lecture on their behalf and the articles she was asked to write for The Scotsman.

Redpath's still lifes of the 1950s, and the present work in particular, illustrate her use of the everyday as a vehicle for conveying the most avant garde of concerns. Redpath has chosen a vase of spring flowers, a seemingly unchallenging subject matter. Her approach, however, is anything but. Redpath has painted the vase of flowers from a high perspective so that the viewer looks down on the subject from a looming vantage point. Redpath often arranged her still life objects on the floor to achieve this effect. The backdrop, apparently a pinkish white tablecloth, is completely flattened against the picture plane so that the vase threatens to fall into the viewer's lap at any moment. Redpath acknowledged her subversion of the traditional subject matter when she commented to the buyer of one of her still lifes, 'Be careful the objects don't fall off when you get it home!' The colour tones of the tablecloth blend into the white wrapping of the flowers which merge into the white flowers, destroying any sense of tangible depth or separate form. The highly patterned decorative section in the upper left corner may be wall paper or perhaps simply one of Redpath's favourite patterns, which possibly reference Henri Matisse who was known for his use of highly decorative textiles to produce visual pleasure and subvert perspective.

Redpath bought many objects for her still lifes from Gordon Small's shop in Princes Street. In 1955 Redpath suffered a coronary thrombosis. Although she produced a great body of work in the next decade, she would never truly recover from this attack. After her death in 1965, Sir William MacTaggart referred to Anne Redpath as 'something of a legend'.