This May, Guy Peploe selects from the subject of Still Life. In art history this subject has produced many masterpieces, countless sub-genres, and lot of efficient, academic works which might not win the Turner Prize but give great pleasure in the domestic realm. Still Life is often the subject chosen by the petit maitres: Van Huysum, Chardin, Morandi and our own Samuel John Peploe, explorations of symbolism, exercises in the pursuit of significant form. In Scotland the still-lifes of the Edinburgh School from Gillies and Redpath to Blackadder have added considerably to the genre, in Glasgow the practice of belle peinture continues to thrive. This selection is modest, personal and focused on Scotland, on the modern period and contemporary examples.

Artists Included; Mary Armour, William Crosbie, Victoria Crowe, J D Fergusson, William Gillies, John Houston, William MacTaggart, Christine McArthur, Ellen Malcolm, Alberto Morrocco, Leon Morrocco, Denis Peploe, S J Peploe, Anne Redpath, Duncan Shanks,David McClure.

Guy Peploe has written a Haiku for each picture within the exhibition – read them here. And if you are interested in attending a short lecture with Guy Peploe discussing the work in this exhibition please register on eventbrite, or contact The Gallery.

S.J. Peploe

Born: 1871

Place of Birth: Edinburgh

Died: 1935

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.

“My memories of S. J. Peploe are the memories of our friendship which was wonderful and interesting all the time. Nothing about it was spectacular. It was merely a happy unbroken friendship between two painters who both believed that painting was not just a craft or profession but a sustained attempt at finding a means of expressing reactions to life in the form demanded by each new experience. This is quite different from arriving at a way of doing a thing and continuing to do it in a tradesmanlike manner. By life we meant everything that happened to us; and, as we were curious about life, we painted all sorts of things – men, women, children, landscape, seapieces, flowers, still-life – anything.” Memories of Peploe, J. D. Fergusson, 1945

S. J. Peploe & The Scottish Gallery

In November 1898, the partners of Aitken Dott & Son bought the painting A Gypsy Queen by S.J. Peploe. Two years before, senior partner Peter McOmish Dott had formed The Scottish Gallery to identify the picture dealing part of the firm as distinct from the other businesses – architectural supplies, artist’s materials, framing, gilding and other services – and determined to represent the best of contemporary Scottish painting. The purchase of Peploe’s painting initiated a close relationship between the firm and the artist, then aged twenty-seven. McOmish Dott was a wholehearted admirer of Peploe’s early paintings, and a show was arranged for January 1903, which was a commercial and critical success. Peploe held a second exhibition in 1909, but from then his practice moved towards modernism and Dott struggled to accept the radical expressionist work the artist brought back from Paris after his move in 1910. However, the younger partner of the firm George Proudfoot, and subsequent directors, continued their support for the artist. From the early 1920s The Gallery held a joint contract with Alexander Reid in Glasgow to buy work directly from the artist, an arrangement that allowed Peploe to remove himself from the commercial world and concentrate on his painting, particularly his new subject of Iona and the magnificent rose and tulip paintings of his maturity. Solo exhibitions were held in 1922, 1923, 1924, 1927, 1934, 1936 (Memorial) and The Scottish Gallery has held numerous notable solo exhibitions subsequently including the artist’s 150th anniversary in 2021.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1903, 1909, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1927, 1934, 1936 (Memorial), 1947, 1985, 1990 (Edinburgh & London), 2012, 2021 (Bicentenary)

Alberto Morrocco

Born: 1917

Place of Birth: Aberdeen

Died: 1998

Alberto Morrocco was born in Aberdeen to Italian parents in 1917. He attended Gray’s School of Art from the prodigious age of fourteen, tutored by James Cowie and Robert Sivell, and won the Carnegie and Brough travelling scholarships, affording him opportunity to paint and study in France, Italy and Switzerland in the late 1930s. After serving in the army between 1940-46 he devoted his time to painting. His subject matter varied from the domestic interior, landscape, imaginings of Italian life, still life and many commissioned portraits. Combining his talent with abundant energy he became one of the most dominant figures in the Scottish artworld in the second half of the 20^th century. David McClure succinctly explained: ‘Alberto painted as an Italian operatic tenor sings, that is with a passionate theatricality and always con brio. Alberto Morrocco was the subject of a centenary exhibition at The Gallery in August 2017.

Christine McArthur

Born: 1953

Place of Birth: Kirkintilloch

Christine McArthur’s work is always changing and developing, in a wide variety of medium, all underwritten by her innate skill in drawing and sense of design.

Christine McArthur trained at the Glasgow School of Art from 1971-76 under David Donaldson and Leon Morrocco. From the mid-1980s she taught at Glasgow University and Glasgow School of Art while working and exhibiting full time. She was elected to the RGI and the RSW. McArthur inhabits an immersive, creative world. The passing seasons are observed, intertwined with imagery from her surroundings and familiar objects. She is a mixed media artist who specialises in oil, oil pastel, embroidery, acrylic, watercolour, pen and ink and collage.

McArthur was awarded Scottish Education Department travelling scholarships in 1975 and 1976 and was elected a member of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1990. In 1995 she was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.

John Houston

Born: 1930

Died: 2008

John Houston was brought up in Buckhaven in Fife, where the ever-changing light over the Forth estuary and fields falling away to the shoreline were the backdrop to an idyllic childhood of horse fairs, golf and football. The landscape eventually inspired him to become a painter. Houston was drawn into the fold of Edinburgh College of Art and became as prodigious and natural a painter as his mentor William Gillies. He travelled widely, making exhibitions after trips to Europe, Japan and America, always with his fellow artist, wife and soul-mate Elizabeth Blackadder. He was an expressionist who could evoke the subtle, particular character of place, but his vision and ambition always looked outward. John Houston was represented by The Scottish Gallery from the late 1950s. He was ten times a solo exhibitor at The Edinburgh International Festival, between 1961 and his last show in 2008. Houston was honoured with a major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2005. His work is held in numerous public collections. We are actively looking for artwork by John Houston. If you have any works you are interested in selling please contact The Gallery.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1960, 1962 (Festival), 1965, 1967 (Festival), 1971 (Festival), 1975, 1980, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2003 (Festival), 2007 (Festival), 2009 (Memorial), 2012, 2013

Click here to view prints by this artist.

Anne Redpath

Born: 1895

Died: 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.

Mary Armour

Born: 1902

Place of Birth: Blantyre

Died: 2000

Mary Armour studied Drawing and Painting at The Glasgow School of Art from 1920. In 1925, after a post-diploma year and teacher training, she became an art teacher, and in 1927 she married the landscape and figure painter William Armour (1903–1979).

Armour exhibited at a number of prestigious institutions from the 1930s onwards, including the Royal Academy, Royal Scottish Academy, Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, Scottish Society of Artists, and Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. She was awarded the Guthrie prize at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1937, and in 1941 she was elected an associate at the Academy. In addition to her art practice, Armour was a lecturer in still-life painting at the GSA from 1951 – 1961.

Awards and honours included full membership of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1958, the Cargill prize at the RGIFA in 1972, full membership of the RFIFA in 1977, and an honorary Doctorate from Glasgow University in 1982. In later life she was elected honorary president of both the GSA and the RGIFA.

William Crosbie

Born: 1915

Place of Birth: Hankow, China

Died: 1999

William Crosbie studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1932-5. A travelling scholarship took him to Paris, where he worked under Fernand Léger, and took classes in History of Art at The Sorbonne and in drawing with Maillol. Crosbie was part of a group of artists and writers who were very active immediately before the Second World War painting portraits. Later in his career it was by working with architects, decorating firms and painting murals that he was able to make a living, and continue to create the paintings that he wanted to paint.

Through his career he excelled in an extraordinary variety of subjects: straightforward landscapes of Scotland, England and France; still life, the female nude, a sort of modern fête champêtre; surrealism; religious painting; portraiture, both intimate and official and the self-portrait.

“As a painter I have always worked in the belief that once you have mastered a technique or perfected a style, that’s the time to stop. Each piece of work should be a fresh beginning as far as possible.” William Crosbie, 1974.

J.D. Fergusson

Born: 1874

Place of Birth: Leith, Edinburgh

Died: 1961

[Fergusson] is a poet with an acute sense for the discipline of form. He has an instinct for the rhythm which makes sense out of a picture just as it informs the shape and meaning of a dance. His pictures and his sculptures seem to move with a musical rhythm. Robins Millar, Glasgow Evening Citizen, May 5th 1948

Born in Leith in Edinburgh, J.D. Fergusson’s studies took him to Paris in the 1890s where he attended the Académie Colarossi and made broad connections in avant-garde life. He exhibited in London in 1905 and finally settled in Paris in 1907 where he experimented with Fauvist and Cubist styles, became a Sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne and acquaintance of many of the leading figures in the movement, including Picasso and Braque. He had four works exhibited in Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition in London, 1913. He lived between France and Britain, eventually settling in Glasgow with his life partner and the pioneering dancer Margaret Morris.

Everyone in Scotland should refuse to have anything to do with black or dirty and dingy colour, and insist on clean colours in everything. I remember when I was young any colour was considered a sign of vulgarity. Greys and blacks were the only colours for people of taste and refinement. Good pictures had to be black, grey, brown or drab. Well! Let’s forget it, and insist on things in Scotland being of colour that makes for and associates itself with light, hopefulness, health and happiness. J.D. Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting, 1943

J. D. Fergusson & The Scottish Gallery

J.D. Fergusson exhibited with The Scottish Gallery in 1923. The exhibition included both small-scale sculpture he had produced over the preceding few years and his Highland series of oil paintings, which represented the artist’s engagement with his native landscape and culture. Twenty years before, he had been one of the purchasers of work from his friend S.J. Peploe’s first exhibition with The Gallery, but in the intervening years he had looked to London and then Paris for his commercial and spiritual existence. It would only be after his second flight from the continent, in the face of WWII, that Scotland would take the central place in his work and thoughts. Fergusson was a paragon of the bohemian life and one of the major contributors to British modernism – uncompromising, Modernist and brilliant. A Memorial exhibition was held for Fergusson at The Scottish Gallery in 1961, and numerous exhibitions have been held since.

Denis Peploe

Born: 1914

Died: 1993

Denis Peploe was born in 1914, the second son of the celebrated Scottish Colourist S. J. Peploe. Denis Peploe enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art at the age of seventeen where he was a contemporary of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Margaret Mellis. He won post-diploma scholarships to Paris and Florence and took advantage of opportunity to travel extensively in Spain, Italy and Yugoslavia. He first exhibited at The Scottish Gallery in 1947, to critical acclaim. The Glasgow Herald critic responded to the exhibition, saying he was “an artist born fully armed”; and The Bulletin critic wrote: “the general impression of the exhibition is that we have in Denis Peploe a vital and adventurous painter”. Reviewers never avoided mention of his father, and though one couldn’t confuse their work there were similarities in their approaches: each picture was a response to a particular subject, either intellectual or emotional. His son, Gallery Director, Guy Peploe explains:

‘While he was intimately exposed to the mainstream of European art he remained better defined as an artist who responded directly to his subject, en plein air or in the studio. Here the challenge was a live model, or the intellectual exercise of reinvigorating the still life subject. His work remained free of political or art-world references but was at the same time formed by the century of modernism, the times of unprecedented turmoil and change to which he belonged. His response was to cleave to the idea that art was important, even redemptive and that it could somehow describe a better, or more vital place.’

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1947, 1948 1951, 1954 1984, 1988, 1990 1995 (Memorial), 2006, 2010, 2014 (Centenary)

We would be delighted to hear from you if you are considering selling any works by Denis Peploe.

Duncan Shanks

Born: 1937

Place of Birth: Airdrie

Duncan Shanks was born in Airdrie in 1937 and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1955 to 1960. During his Post Diploma year he was awarded a travelling scholarship which enabled a visit to Italy. On his return to Glasgow he joined the Art School staff where he lectured until 1979, before leaving to concentrate on painting full-time. Duncan’s first solo exhibition was hosted by Stirling University in 1974. Since then he has exhibited worldwide with notable public exhibitions including Falling Water at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh in 1988, Patterns of Flight at Wrexham Art Centre in 1991 and Poetry of Place at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, which coincided with the bequest of the entirety of his sketchbooks to their collection in 2013. Shanks is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Glasgow Institute and Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour. He has been the subject of twelve solo exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery; his most recent, The Riverbank, was the Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition for 2022.

David McClure

Born: 1926

Place of Birth: Lochwinnoch

Died: 1998

McClure was one of a group of highly regarded young painters that included James Cumming, William Baillie, John Houston, Elizabeth Blackadder and David Michie all of whom graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s. Their formative years benefited from the examples of a remarkable concentration of talent in the capital, both on the Art College staff and in the annual exhibitions of the RSA, RSW, SSA or SSWA. In addition, The Scottish Gallery was regularly showing established artists such as Anne Redpath, William Gillies, William MacTaggart, as well as younger artists like Joan Eardley and Robin Philipson. McClure and many of his Edinburgh College peers soon joined them. McClure had his first one-man show with The Scottish Gallery in 1957 and the following decade saw regular exhibitions of his work.

He was included in the important surveys of contemporary Scottish art which began to define the Edinburgh School throughout the 1960s and culminated in his Edinburgh Festival show at The Gallery in 1969. But he was, even by 1957 (after a year’s painting in Florence and Sicily) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, alongside his great friend Alberto Morrocco, applying the rigour and inspiration that made the college such a bastion of painting.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1957, 1962, 1966, 1969 (Festival), 1989, 1992, 1994, 1996 (70th Birthday Exhibition), 2000 (Memorial), 2003, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2022

Victoria Crowe

Born: 1945

Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art from 1961-65 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1965-68. At her postgraduate show, she was invited by Sir Robin Philipson to teach at Edinburgh College of Art. For thirty years she worked as a part-time lecturer in the School of Drawing and Painting while developing her own artistic practice. She lives and works in West Linton and Edinburgh. Her first one-person exhibition, after leaving the Royal College of Art, was in London and has subsequently held over fifty, one person shows.

Victoria Crowe’s first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. In August 2018, The Gallery held a major exhibition of paintings to coincide with The Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective of Victoria Crowe’s portraits. In 2019 The City Art Centre held a retrospective entitled 50 Years of Painting. This exhibition embraced every aspect of Crowe’s practice and featured over 150 paintings, works on paper and sketchbooks and several films of the artist were commissioned.

Victoria Crowe is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours (RSW). Crowe has exhibited nationally and internationally and undertaken many important portrait commissions, including HRH The King, RD Laing, Peter Higgs and Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Crowe’s work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

In 2000, Crowe’s exhibition A Shepherd’s Life, consisting of work selected from the 1970s and 80s, was curated for the National Galleries of Scotland’s to mark the Millennium. The exhibition toured Scotland and was re-gathered in 2009 for the Fleming Collection, London.

Crowe was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2004 and from 2004-2007, she was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge. The resulting work, Plant Memory, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007 and subsequently toured Scotland. In 2009 she received an Honorary Degree from The University of Aberdeen and in 2010 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

In 2013, Dovecot Studios wove a large-scale tapestry of Crowe’s painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland. In 2015, Crowe invited as artist-in-residence at Dumfries House and in 2016 a group of work from the residency was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland. Crowe was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers’ in 2014, to design a forty-metre tapestry for their new hall in the city of London, which took over three years to weave and was installed in January 2017. Dovecot worked with Victoria Crowe to produce a new tapestry inspired by a detail from her painting Twilight, Venice, 2014. The new tapestry, Richer Twilight, Venice was completed and unveiled at the end of September 2019.

Following a residency in Orkney in 2022, the Pier Art Centre in Stromness held a major exhibition of new work, Touching the Surface from August to November 2024, in which she looked specifically at the contrasting light around the summer and winter solstices.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1970, 1973, 1977, 1982, 1995, 1998, 2001 (Festival), 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 (Festival), 2012, 2014 (Festival), 2016, 2018 (Festival), 2019, 2021, 2023, 2025 (Festival, 80^th)

To view Victoria Crowe’s prints please click here

Sir William Gillies

Born: 1898

Place of Birth: Haddington

Died: 1973

Sir William Gillies was the dominant figure of the Edinburgh School over which both his personality and his work had a quiet authority. He led by example at the College of Art, encouraging his students to experiment but from a firm grounding in looking, and of course practice, drawing in particular. He also selected his staff to reflect this ethos: men and women who had a similar independence but respected hard work, what William MacTaggart called the good habit. The duties of teaching for Gillies and many of his colleagues in the School of Drawing and Painting were combined with their own practice without conflict; being a professional painter: working and exhibiting, was understood as integral to the reputation and health of the School. Robin Philipson, Elizabeth Blackadder, John Houston, David Michie and James Cumming were the beneficiaries of this attitude, along with their students, quietly instilled by Gillies over his fifty years of influence.

I have been trying to pin down my thoughts on the great man. I do not find it easy. In a way he remains an enigma. I was a student for five years while Gillies was Head of Paintings and yet I had only three or four lessons from him in all that time. The first was when MacTaggart called for Bill Gillies to come and see a painting I had done. He admired it generously and commended it for its tonal values. I had on the easel a much more freely painted thing with apples and a jug. He looked at it and said Apples are not tennis balls. They have planes. He then proceeded to push the wet paint around with his horny thumb, making the apples truly three dimensional, and expressed in planes. On another occasion I was propounding a theory I had come across about Organic Colour Values… I asked him if he did not agree with this. His esponse was typically anti-intellectual. No. Nature always gets the colour wrong, so you have to try to improve it.

David McClure, quoted in W.G. Gillies by W. Gordon Smith, Atelier Books, 1991

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1945, 1949, 1952, 1958 (Festival), 1963 (Festival), 1968, 1971, 1986, 1989, 1991 (Festival), 2011, 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2023 (Anniversary)

Still Life

Join our mailing list