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framed dimensions: 50.5 x 70.5 cm
signed lower left
Dark Tulips in a Jug is a masterful example of Anne Redpath’s late work: bold, expressive, and rich with texture. Painted in 1962, during the final and highly productive phase of her career, the composition demonstrates Redpath’s complete confidence with the still life genre, and her shift away from conventional spatial order in favour of rhythmic abstraction. A decorated jug brimming with dark tulips dominates the scene, placed on an upturned table cloaked in a blue cover. Nearby, a bowl of plums anchors the arrangement, their rounded forms and rich colour balancing the vertical thrust of the blooms. The palette is at once moody and luminous: deep blues and inky purples offset by flashes of white and pale light, creating the kind of tonal drama Redpath valued so highly. Executed in impasto, the surface is alive with painterly energy. The flowers and fabric are not meticulously rendered but rather suggested, painted loosely, even instinctively, with thick swirls and tactile flourishes. Redpath often worked with palette knife, the end of her brush, to activate the surface. That physical engagement with the medium is keenly felt here. By this time in her career, Redpath had fully embraced a more abstract language. The background is not a quiet void but a dynamic field, swirling, textured, and deliberately ambiguous. Though Dark Tulips in a Jug is robust in its execution, it retains a remarkable delicacy. It reveals Redpath’s rare ability to balance decorative beauty with emotional depth, giving impact and radiance to the beauty of the ordinary.
Anne Redpath was a pivotal figure in the group of painters now referred to as The Edinburgh School. She had attended the College of Art, receiving her diploma in 1917. After a lengthy spell in the south of France, Redpath returned to Hawick in the mid-1930s. Her brilliant manipulation of paint, left in delicious peaks or eked across a rough surface with a palette knife, is characteristic of the varied responses to different subjects at different times. In the last years of her output she often favoured a limited palette; perhaps a few brilliant, jewel-like notes enlivening a dark or white composition.
Redpath was an inspirational person and formed many enduring friendships. Her flat in London Street became an artistic salon, celebrated by Sir Robin Philipson’s famous, affectionate group portrait in The Scottish National Portrait Gallery. She had considerable commercial success in her lifetime, enjoying a fruitful, consistent relationship with The Scottish Gallery and then with Reid & Lefevre in London. Since her passing, her reputation has been further enhanced with retrospective and centenary exhibitions resulting in her being established as one of the great figures in 20th Century Scottish Painting.
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