Landscape, Ross and Cromarty, c.1949

signed lower right

EXHBITED:
Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, Edinburgh

PROVENANCE:
The Artist’s Estate

In the late forties, close friends of Denis Peploe, Torquil and Isobel Nicolson, moved from Edinburgh to the Old Manse, Plockton and an ancient caravan in the garden became a regular holiday destination for Peploe, often joined by Sidney Goodsir Smith and the French painter Grégoire Michonze. From here, the dramatic mountain landscape became the artist’s most significant subject. When family arrived in the late fifties, they came too, and Lucy and Guy remember evenings lit by gaslight, foraging for berries and fungi, and the occasional wash in the ‘big house’. The village provided spectacular views across the loch to the mountains of Torridon and Applecross, while trips on the Nicolsons’ yacht, The Rodney, allowed access to more remote places in which to set up an easel.

In oil or watercolour, Peploe recorded the dark, brooding crags and troubled waters, with weather changing by the hour and a harsh urgency informing the painting. A sense of awe, of the sublime, inhabits these works, so far removed from the relative gentility of the Lowlands and the mastery over the subject evident in the studio.