Samuel John Peploe, R.S.A.

Sale: Christie's Edmiston, Glasgow, 4 June, 1979;
Private Collection

The canvas is original. On very close inspection there are some very minor isolated undulations to the canvas in the upper left quadrant and elsewhere. Otherwise in good original condition, clean and ready to hang. Held in a decorative gold painted frame in fair condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The quest for the perfect still life absorbed Peploe for the greater part of his life, almost to the point of obsession, as his brother-in-law, Frederick Porter recounted, 'All his still life[s] were carefully arranged and considered before he put them on canvas. When this was done - it often took several days to accomplish - he seemed to have absorbed everything necessary for transmitting them to canvas. The result was a canvas covered without any apparent effort. If a certain touch was wrong it was soon obliterated by the palette knife. The whole canvas had to be finished in one painting so as to preserve complete continuity. If, in his judgement, it was not right then the whole painting was scraped out and painted again' (see F.P. Porter, The Art of S.J. Peploe, New Alliance, VI, no. 6, 1945-46, p. 7).

Peploe's biographer Stanley Cursiter describes how after the First World War, 'studies of roses in particular, began to appear, forming the first of a series of rose pictures which he continued to produce throughout the years, changing as his style developed but invariably fine.' Depending on the availability of flowers, Peploe painted studies of roses in the summer, tulips in the spring and common objects such as blue and white vases, fans and dinner plates. 'When he selected his flowers or fruit from a painter's point of view he presented a new problem to the Edinburgh florists. They did not always understand when he rejected a lemon for its form or a pear for its colour, and he remained unmoved by their protestations of ripeness or flavour'. Peploe's compositions and choices of colour share the same deliberation and meticulousness and by this period of his career, he had finely-tuned his vision to such a degree that the effect is at once strikingly intense and harmoniously ordered. In the early years of the 1920s Peploe painted a series of vibrant still-lifes of flowers and fruit, in which he developed his approach to painting, concentrating less on texture and tone and making colour, form and symmetry his central concern. Moving away from the more Manetesque style of his earlier period, Peploe developed a way of painting more closely akin to that of Cezanne and the Fauves with their tropical colour and delineated tone. In the resulting still-lifes, broadly applied paint expresses the forms of citrus fruit, flower blooms, oriental vases and fans as studies of shape and colour, emphasising and echoing one another in the decorative treatment of space.