Still Life with Bananas and Flowers, c.1984

PROVENANCE:
The Artist’s Estate

signed lower right

Painted around 1984, this bold and richly textured still life belongs to the period when Denis Peploe began exhibiting with The Scottish Gallery, encouraged in part by his son Guy Peploe, who had recently joined the firm. The moment marked a renewed public engagement with Denis’s work and, more broadly, a recognition of his place within one of Scotland’s artistic dynasties.

The painting carries a subtle and affectionate dialogue with the work of his father, S.J. Peploe, whose still lifes helped redefine modern Scottish painting in the first third of the twentieth century. Bananas first appeared in Peploe’s work in 1907, their curved forms and exotic associations becoming symbols of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and bold decorative colour. Imported into Britain in increasing quantities from the late Victorian period, bananas were unavailable during WWII and Denis recalled travelling to Britany shortly after Armistice to start to paint again and revelling the availability of bananas, buying a whole bunch.

Denis P’s Still Life with Bananas and Flowers possesses a muscular physicality and expressive immediacy. Built up with thick passages of paint applied using a palette knife, the surface is richly worked and tactile. This still life quietly acknowledges continuity as well as independence. As the son of one of the great Scottish Colourists, Denis understood the still life tradition intimately, and here he pays tribute through reinvention. The result is a personal meditation on inheritance and painting itself: a still life that belongs unmistakably to Denis Peploe while gently echoing the visual language of his father.