Samuel John Peploe, R.S.A.

Ewan Mundy Fine Art Ltd., Glasgow;
Private Collection

The canvas is original. On extremely close inspection there are one or two tiny lines of craquelure. Otherwise in good original condition, clean and ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals no sign of retouching. Held in a decorative compsite frame in fair condition. Under glass and unexamined out of frame.
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Red and Pink Roses, Oranges and Fan was painted in the first half of the 1920s and is contemporary with the best examples of Peploe's still life paintings, including Still Life with Tulips (sold Sotheby's, Hopetoun House, 24 April 2006, lot 126 for £523,000) and Still Life with Pink Roses and Oranges (sold Sotheby's, Hopetoun House, 18 April 2005, lot 103). The blue and white porcelain, lacquer fans, books and brightly contrasting fabric drapes link the series of still-lifes of this period. They are recognizable for their saturated primary colours and are more complex in arrangement than earlier examples.

Around 1919 Peploe painted a striking series of still lifes with roses, remarkable for their bright colouring and bold compositions and redolent of the modernism of the unfolding jazz-age. Peploe had used colour at its highest pitch since his return to Scotland from a period in France in 1913. At first he painted bold, colourful still lifes and landscapes in which primary tones were emphasised by strong black outlines. By 1919 he ceased to differentiate the changes of plane and colour with outlines and the juxtaposition of bright colours placed side by side was used to convey intensity; '... the main impression gathered from his paintings is of colour, intense colour, and colour in its most colourful aspect. One is conscious of material selected for inclusion in still-life groups because of its colourful effect; reds, blues, and yellows are unmistakably red, blue and yellow; the neutrals are black and white.' (Stanley Cursiter, Peploe: An Intimate Memoir of an Artist and his Work, 1946, p. 43). By this period in his career Peploe was an established artist with a fully rounded sense of his artistic aims. His reputation was affirmed by his election to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1917 and by highly successful exhibitions at Aitken Dott & Sons in Edinburgh. His paintings were confidently bold in execution and composition, rhythmic in arrangement and vibrant in colour. The paintings of roses mark the epitome of his still life paintings of this period in which the angles created by the drooping stems of the roses and the edges of the books and closed fans are contrasted by the softer voluptuous curves of ripe citrus fruit and the contours of porcelain. Further angles are created by the edge tablecloth and drapes add a further element of contrast and divide the pictorial space into a series of shapes flooded with pure colour, not unlike stained-glass or the oriental prints so beloved by the Colourists and immortalised by Peploe in Interior with a Japanese Print of 1916 (University of Hull Art Collection).

The years spanning the war had been formative years for Peploe in which he experimented, studied and concentrated on 'the problems of colour, form, and lighting'. He emerged from this period, fully formed, 'He was like a coiled spring awaiting merely the opportunity to expand.' He embarked upon his most productive artistic phase, his popularity having fully recovered from a period of depression in the years 1910-1913 when his style began to change from the more fluid transformation. After a handful of collectors recognised the merit of his later canvases, with their definite pattern and bright colours, others were close to follow and Peploe's reputation was once again restored. In 1917, his status was heightened further by his election to the Royal Scottish Academy, which brought his more reticent collectors the official recognition they needed to start to snap up the still-lifes which were leaving his studio via his agent Aitken Dott and Sons. Highly successful exhibitions in 1916 and 1917 had established Peploe as a painter to be reckoned with and, just as today, he has emerged once more from a period of neglect; in the 1920s he found himself commanding relatively high prices for his pictures.

The connection between the work of Peploe and Cadell was particularly strong at this time and although the artists did not share a studio on a permanent basis, there is likely that Peploe used Cadell's studio on occasion. The dark blue painted wall in the background of the present picture features strongly in paintings by Cadell from the early 1920s including Still Life and Rosechatel of 1924 (Hunterian Art Gallery) and also in other pictures by Peploe such as A Vase of Pink Roses c.1925 (Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation). Cadell's simple red-painted dining chair is the same example that appears in paintings by both Cadell and Peploe and became a staple prop in both artist's work. The influence of the Fauves upon the two artists work was predominantly generated by Peploe's enthusiasm for the art he had seen in Paris in the earlier years of the decade. This interest manifested itself in the saturated colours and flattened perspectives of his still-lifes '... and a simplification of modelling with a consequent emphasis on pattern. Both the patterns made by the shapes of the objects in these paintings - jug, fruit, bowl, chair - and the flat decorative patterns of the pieces of cloth used as drapes in the background combine to create an overall abstract design which is the true subject of the painting.' (Roger Billcliffe, The Scottish Colourists; Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter, Peploe, 1989, p. 43). Red and Pink Roses, Oranges and Fan can be compared with Henri Matisse's Anémones au Miroir Noir painted between 1918 and 1919 (Sotheby's New York, 7 November 2001, lot 17, sold for $4,185,750), both pictures parring the angular lines suggested by arrangements of still life and furniture into images of reflecting and contrasting tones and shapes.