S. J. Peploe | The Media Response

2021 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of S. J. Peploe. The Scottish Gallery is marking the event with a major exhibition, and it has two good reasons to do so: its director, Guy Peploe, is the artist’s grandson and the gallery has shown Peploe’s work since 1903. There was a break in 1913 when he got too modern for the gallery’s director, Peter McOmish Dott, but the relationship was picked up again in 1922. It continued until the artist’s death in 1935 and thereafter until it became a family relationship when Guy Peploe became director of the gallery. Photographs of the artist’s family and friends give the show a family feel, too, but it also roots the artist and his work in the real world.

The exhibition marks a new contribution to his grandfather’s memory and will showcase some of Peploe’s greatest works. This includes 30 never-seen-before drawings from a family archive and several of his greatest paintings, with key loans sourced from notable private collections.

Today the qualities of Samuel John Peploe: the early achievements, the timelessness of his mature oeuvre, the seriousness of his quest for the masterpiece, the direct expressionist appeal of his first Modernist pictures, the subtle delivery of his emotionally laden palette, all identify a significant contributor to our cultural history; one of our greatest painters