Samuel John Peploe, R.S.A.

Alexander Reid at La Société des Beaux-Arts, Glasgow, January 1920, where acquired by the previous owner's family for £48 and thence by descent
Their sale, Christie's London, 26th October 2006, lot 183
Richard Green, London, where acquired by the present owner

Original canvas. The work is clean and in good overall condition with strong bold vivid colours. Ultraviolet light reveals a few flecks of retouching to frame abrasions in the upper right corner. Other pigments fluoresce which are the hand of the artist. Held in a gilt plaster frame with a canvas inset. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The present work was executed at the outset of arguably the most successful decade of Peploe's career.  He spent much of WWI working around Kirkcudbright, an artists colony that included a number of fellow painters such as Ernest Archibald Taylor and Jessie Marion King, whom Peploe had known during his time in Paris.   Inspired by the light and local environment, he produced a number of fine landscapes during this period, but as the conflict in Europe came to an end he was firmly refocused on his ambition to produce 'the perfect still life'.

A wide variety of powerful influences affected his work at this point and led to a number of distinct changes in style during a relatively short period.  The overtly Cubist works, which also contained elements of the Vorticist movement, from the mid-war period, gave way to strongly outlined compositions reminiscent of earlier painters such as Van Gogh, Gauguin and in particular Cézanne.  By the time the present work was executed in 1920, these influences had fused and combined into a manner of painting that would ultimately define Peploe's output.

In the present work, the cobalt-blue wall and polished wooden table top form two distinct, geometric colour plains.  This pronounced compositional structure is further enhanced by the precisely diagonal line of ceramics standing parallel to the edge of the surface.  The bold foundation is layered with a rich and complex variety of reflective colour.  Perspective and outline are created by tonal contrast and confident yet subtle shading, resulting in a harmonious, synthesis between colour and form.  This undoubtedly marks out Peploe's mature style which was refined and developed throughout the 1920s.  In 1925 Walter Sickert wrote an introduction to a catalogue of Peploe's works shown at the Leicester Galleries, and explained this development,

'[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 and 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.'