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framed dimensions 57.5 x 44.5 cm
signed lower right
From a Room in Úbeda was painted during Redpath’s travels in Andalucía in 1953, exemplifying Redpath’s brilliant ability to fuse intimacy with structure, capturing the interior while playing with pattern, perspective, and light.
We look from the shadowed interior of a Spanish room outward, through parted, ornamented curtains gathered with silk tiebacks, to a sunlit street scene in the town of Úbeda. She replicated these drapes in her own home in Edinburgh. The viewer’s eye is drawn across terrazzo floor tiles, subtly coloured with warm pinks and mauves, where the reflected blue of the sky dances across their polished surface. A slender iron balcony leads us into the space beyond, where we glimpse a pantile rooftop and pale blue sky, framed by the verticals of architecture and curtains alike.
Through her expressive handling of gouache and characteristic use of colour and texture, Redpath creates not just a view, but a moment, a luminous meeting of interior and exterior worlds, filled with warmth, elegance, and visual intelligence. Redpath often painted interiors as a means of reflecting on place and perception, and From a Room in Úbeda is a perfect example of her knack for transforming the ordinary into something richly evocative.
EXHIBITED
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1965
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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