signed lower right
PROVENANCE:
The Artist’s Estate
Denis Peploe and thence by descent
Still life with Tulips belonged to the late Elizabeth Peploe and was painted around 1930-31, in the final years of the artist’s life, when his painting style became increasingly and freely painted. Here, Peploe has moved beyond the carefully balanced formalism of his earlier compositions towards something looser and more immediate, allowing paint, colour, and rhythm to animate the surface.
The painting is particularly striking for its rich interplay of objects, pattern, and colour. Rather than isolating the bouquet against a restrained background, Peploe creates a layered and highly decorative composition in which flowers, ceramics, fabric and tabletop exist in dynamic conversation with one another.
The palette is at once bold and nuanced, combining deep reds, soft mauves, warm ochres, and vivid passages of blue and green. These colour relationships create a heightened decorative intensity while maintaining the harmony that defines Peploe’s finest work.
From the late twenties, bouts of ill-health interrupted the hard work which had characterised the painter’s studio life. Still life with Tulips is likely to have been painted in the artist’s last Edinburgh studio on the corner of Queen Street and Castle Street where he had moved in late 1931 in a spirit of optimism. Another similar tulip painting, now in the collection of Aberdeen Art Gallery, was found on his easel after he died.
About S.J. Peploe
Born in 1871 in Edinburgh, S.J. Peploe is the senior of the four artists known as The Scottish Colourists. He lived in Paris from 1910 until 1912, where his work changed radically from paintings reminiscent of Manet and Sargent to brilliant Fauvist works which placed him in the vanguard of British Modernism.
