The Colourists were prolific draftsmen, seldom without a sketchbook, essential to the working artist. The exhibition includes ten recently acquired works by J D Fergusson.
Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell RSA, RSW (1883-1937)
John Duncan Fergusson RBA (1874-1961)
George Leslie Hunter (1877-1931)
Samuel John Peploe RSA (1871-1935)
The almost complete lack of ‘angst’ in his work seems to derive from an intense love of life, a sensuous enjoyment of good living and an admiration for men who were masculine and women who were elegant. His subject-matter reflected his hedonism. Guy Peploe
Cadell was born in Edinburgh in 1883 and from an early age, showed a precocious talent for art and was producing very capable watercolours and drawings in his early teens. Half French, he was taken to France and Munich by his mother for artistic education and some very fine, freely painted farmyard paintings date from this early period. Despite his sophistication, Cadell’s most natural habitat was the west Highlands, Iona in particular, and he made only a few painting trips to France after the War. He produced some of his most brilliant Colourist works while staying with the Peploes in Cassis in 1924. Very fashion conscious, his work before 1914 had an Edwardian opulence and breadth unique in Scottish painting. By the twenties his work had a hard edge with clear colour, chiming with the jazz-age, and the compositions have a deco stylishness full of sophistication of concept and originality of palette. He is as original and distinctive a voice as any in Scottish painting.
F.C.B. Cadell & The Scottish Gallery
F.C.B. Cadell first exhibited with The Gallery in 1909, and his second in 1910 showcased his Venetian paintings. The visit to Venice had been productive and represented (as with Peploe and Fergusson in Royan in the same year) his full engagement with a personal impressionism in which colour was used for direct expressionist purpose. His was a precocious early career, brilliant in watercolour, encouraged by Arthur Melville. In oil, his earlier work is characterised by rich medium, broad-brush marks and is high in tone, unlike the more sonorous works of Peploe and Fergusson’s early Edinburgh years. His next exhibition with The Scottish Gallery was not until 1932, at a time when picture sales were in decline due to the Great Depression. Cadell had always been comfortable to be his own agent, using the artist-run Society of Eight for many of his exhibitions of new work, and on Iona, where he spent every summer after The Great War. There he set up a daily exhibition of the fruits of his labour, his manservant Charles Oliver acting as sales agent, selling to the many wealthy summer visitors, like David Russell of Markinch and George Service of Cove.
[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.
Born in Rothesay in 1877, George Leslie Hunter emigrated to California in 1892 where his father bought a farm. He spent all his time drawing and when his family came back to Scotland in 1900 he remained in California and became part of the Bohemian lifestyle of San Francisco. He earned money by acquiring illustration work for newspapers and magazines. He went to New York with friends and then on to Paris in 1904, working in each city for a few months. Back in San Francisco he lost everything in the 1906 earthquake and shortly thereafter returned to Scotland. He had his first solo exhibition with Alexander Reid in Glasgow in 1915, an association which continued until his death in 1931. From 1923 he exhibited with Peploe and Cadell as the Three Scottish Colourists, and spent much of the twenties in France, often subsidised by Reid and a coterie of dedicated collectors, including T.J. Honeyman who wrote his biography after his untimely death at the age of fifty-four.
Leslie Hunter, as I review the good old days, seems to be all-pervasive. I knew him first in San Francisco, and we lived the carefree Bohemian life and were unaware of it. I moved to New York; and he came down Broadway as accustomed as a piece of scenery. Paris – and there was Hunter sketching on a street corner. London – and Hunter hailed me from the next table of a Chelsea restaurant. Glasgow – and Hunter, finding my name at a hotel in an obscure newspaper paragraph, called me up on the telephone. I have no doubt that if I ever visit Damascus I shall find him there ahead of me. And always the same Hunter; Scotch from his accent to his walk, quietly friendly, quaintly witty. I had laughed with him many times over these recurrent meetings of ours before I realised how much the boy I knew and starved with in San Francisco was coming to mean in modern art. When in the first decade of this century painting shook off the Victorian shackles, he found himself. Reid, the famous Glasgow dealer, a leader in the Modernist movement, ‘brought him out’. Reid it was who introduced Degas, Manet and Renoir to Great Britain. Tradition says that he was one of the few men whom the crusty Degas would admit to his Studio. He sold most of Whistler’s paintings. And Reid’s verdict that Hunter is ‘a more powerful Colourist than Matisse and equally refined’ carries authenticity. Hunter belongs to that school which Paris calls les écossais modernes. This group of late has given exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries in London and the select Barbazanges Gallery in Paris: in both instances the force and purity of their colour attracted sensational attention. Fergusson and Peploe of this modern group have already exhibited in New York; but although Hunter grew up in California this is his first appearance in an American gallery. He lives and paints, now, on the Côte d’Azur; and that richly coloured country is the inspiration for most of these landscapes. Will Irwin, 1929 (reviewing Hunter’s exhibition at the Ferargil Gallery, New York)
G. L. Hunter & The Scottish Gallery
In April 1924, Alexander Reid and The Scottish Gallery signed a joint contract with G.L. Hunter and his first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was held in the autumn. This was a momentous year for The Colourists which saw the exhibition Les Peintres de l’Écosse Moderne at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, featuring Peploe, Fergusson, Hunter and Cadell. It was also a productive time for Hunter, who worked in Fife, on Loch Lomond and in a Glasgow studio for most of the next three years. From 1928, Hunter was living mostly in the South of France, based in Saint[1]Paul-de-Vence, but he continued to send work back to The Gallery.
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)
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