R. GREEN -scottish-colourists-v2

THE SCOT TISH COLOURISTS

Exhibition opens Wednesday 9th May 2012 All paintings in this catalogue are for sale

33 New Bond Street, London W1S 2RS Tel: +44 (0)207 499 4738 Fax: +44 (0)207 495 3318 Email: paintings@richard-green.com For Directors’ contact details, please see the back of the catalogue

www.richard-green.com Cover detail: John Duncan Fergusson, Grace McColl Cat. no. 34

THE SCOT TISH COLOURISTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE rsa 1871 – Edinburgh – 1935

29 30 31

Roses and teacup Still life with flowers, fruit and fan Roses

JOHN DUNCAN FERGUSSON rba Leith 1874 – 1961 Glasgow

32 33 34

At the piano Paris Grace McColl

GEORGE LESLIE HUNTER Rothesay 1877 – 1931 Glasgow

35 36 37 38

Still life with a silver teapot Still life with tulips and fruit Boats and figure, Largo Figures on the pier, Largo

FRANCIS CAMPBELL BOILEAU CADELL rsa rws 1883 – Edinburgh – 1937

39

Iona looking towards Lunga

INTRODUCTION

In 1945 one of the Scottish artists now known as the Colourists, J D Fergusson, wrote of how he and S J Peploe considered painting to be not a craft nor a profession but ‘a sustained attempt’ to express each new experience. The paintings of all four, whether a landscape, a portrait, a still life or a subject celebrating the vibrancy of urban life, always convey a real sense of joie de vivre which few can match. Today their names are said almost in the same breath, but the Colourists were never a close-knit group, but rather four highly individual artists who at different times came to know one another, shared dealers, occasionally exhibited together in twos or threes, and, above all, observed a common attitude and total commitment to painting. None of them would ever have considered an alternative profession: indeed, Peploe, the eldest of the four, at the age of twenty gave up his law apprenticeship and a lucrative future salary to study art in Edinburgh, his firm by all accounts complaining of his spending too much time idling in Princes Street Gardens.

Coming from a variety of places and backgrounds, the Colourists were strongly aware of the work of their forebears, the Glasgow School artists such as Arthur Melville, William York Macgregor, John Lavery, George Henry and James Paterson whose use of brilliant colour to capture the rich evocation of a place or person had earned them international plaudits.

Fergusson in particular acknowledged his debt to their ‘spirit of freedom and colour’. His pre-war oil paintings of Paris capture this, but this spirit can also be applied to his more experimental figurative paintings of the period. Fergusson always enjoyed the company of women, their femininity and dress, and in his sympathetic portraits the figures were carefully balanced by a surrounding echo and patterning of colour. Place and sitter were presented completely as one.

None of the four can be in any sense considered provincial.

Fergusson and Peploe had shown in London since 1905 and 1906 and both exhibited with Paris’s Salon d’Automne within a few years. Being Sociétaires of this Salon gave them special privileges such as tickets for theatre and dance including the

Ballets Russes. But throughout their careers all these artists, however independent, owed everything to their principal dealers in Edinburgh (Aitken Dott & Son), Glasgow (Alexander Reid, Pearson & Westergaard) and London (Reid & Lefevre). They were first labelled ‘Colourists’ in a 1948 group exhibition of their paintings held at the Glasgow gallery of T & R Annan. By that date only one of the painters, Fergusson, was still alive – and by now living locally. To some extent their grouping was far less obvious at the start of their careers. Two of the four men had received a formal art training at Paris’s Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi – Peploe, following his Edinburgh School of Art studies, and F C B Cadell a few years later. By contrast Fergusson, who may also have studied at Colarossi’s, and Leslie Hunter studied and absorbed the art of the past and present – including seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the recent art of Manet and the Impressionists.

The Colourists were also rather different temperamentally and in their chosen lifestyles – Hunter, a loner, lived a relative handto-mouth and peripatetic existence in Scotland and France and at the time of his death was considering a London studio; the gregarious Fergusson, who lived variously in Edinburgh, Paris, London, the South of France and Glasgow, was above all a Francophile always keen to discuss European modern culture in its many forms – art, poetry, philosophy and, by 1948, Celtic identity; Peploe, the only family man of the four, remained in Edinburgh most of his life with a few years in pre-war Paris and, later, regular visits to other parts of France and Scotland; and Cadell essentially a born bon viveur who enjoyed good conversation in Edinburgh or on his visits to the Scottish island of Iona or the south of France. Their shared aim as painters was always to experience, interpret and release the qualities inherent in a subject or place. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the oil paintings of Iona, the Inner Hebrides island to which Cadell introduced Peploe in 1920. It is a remarkable place for its unique west coast light and colour – as well as its early medieval cultural heritage. From the 1920s, Iona was a place of artists and craftsmen and still attracts today’s painters. Peploe and Cadell both found its character as inspirational in its own way

as Cassis on France’s south coast where all four painted during this period. Living in the south was deeply agreeable and at that time also cheap, and therefore it is not surprising that all spent at least some summer months there.

Like their Scottish precursors, the Colourists had been initially attracted to the fluency and palette of the Impressionists. After the war, and in tune with the new wave of classicism across the arts, particularly in France, a new sober formalism entered most of their work. As a mature painter, Peploe especially was inspired by the considered intellectualism of French painting. In 1950 T J Honeyman, a physician-turned-dealer who by now was the director of Glasgow’s art gallery and the man responsible for coining their collective name, wrote, ‘Peploe and Hunter ... were among the first in Britain to understand what Cézanne was attempting to do, and they never ceased to be aware of colour as the fundamental element in pictorial art and its constructive function was all-important’. The road to this intellectualism can be seen by contrasting Peploe’s elegant and relatively decorative colour blue-edged patterning of vases and flowers of the immediate post-war years with the structured still life paintings of the mid-1920s. In his best still life work, Hunter, too, moved towards a true synthesis of form: the early darker backgrounds inspired by Dutch work yielding to a lighter, freer dynamism. At this time Cadell too was changing his approach in his dramatic paintings of interiors, notably his own home and studio, which bonded the colours of Matisse via Paul Poiret and Art Deco with a delicious sense of theatre.

Form in painting and sculpture was a subject much discussed

by Peploe and Fergusson. They read widely and particularly appreciated the writings of Roger Fry. Peploe aimed high to perfect the classic values of art, and in his work a still life’s components were carefully thought through, rationalised ahead of putting brush to canvas – he did not want to have a ‘struggle on the canvas’, as Fergusson put it, referring also to Peploe’s paintings of the mid-1920s as the result of working towards a ‘severe synthesis’. Their appreciation of Cézanne was serious.

In 1922 Hunter observed that he, Peploe and Fergusson (then

living in London) hoped to have the critic Roger Fry, a key interpreter of the French artist, deliver one of a series of lectures on modern art in Glasgow. Another London-based artist and writer, Walter Sickert, wrote an introduction for the catalogue of a 1925 show by all four at the Leicester Galleries, an exhibition in part transferred from the Galleries Barbazanges, Paris, the previous year under the title Les Peintres de l’Ecosse Moderne.

In a show carefully orchestrated by their dealers, the Colourists were now ambassadors for Scotland.

The fame each artist achieved in his lifetime was truly international with all having at least one commercial show in America in the later 1920s and the work of Hunter, Peploe and Fergusson bought for the French nation. Although all four might claim to be Scottish above all else – of the four Peploe was one who would never have contemplated a life in London – they never restricted their outlook to their home soil. Art for them was principally about ideas and beyond mere geographical boundaries. Maybe that was part of their very Scottishness.

Their subjects ranged from the portrait or still life to sunfilled scenes in Paris and Scotland, from Largo in Fife to the bejewelled waters of Iona. But, as for the Impressionists before them, the subject was always life itself.

Dr Elizabeth Cumming Independent art historian and Hon. Fellow, Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow

John Duncan Fergusson and Samuel John Peploe, north-west France, c. 1905 Courtesy of The Fergusson Gallery, Perth and Kinross Council

29

SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE rsa 1871 – Edinburgh – 1935

Roses and teacup Signed S J Peploe • Painted circa 1925 Oil on canvas: 22 x 20 in / 55.9 x 50.8 cm • Framed size: 31 x 29 in / 78.7 x 73.7 cm PROVENANCE

J W Blyth Esq, Kirkcaldy • Sale, Sotheby’s, Gleneagles, 7th August 1979, lot 649 • Private collection, Scotland • Sale, Christie’s, Glasgow, 12th November 1998, lot 41 • Cyril Stein E XHIBITED

Kirkcaldy, Art Gallery and Museum, Loan Exhibition, July – August 1928, no. 131 • Edinburgh, Aitken Dott & Son, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by S J Peploe, RSA, April – May 1936, no. 67

From 1914 onwards, Samuel John Peploe endeavoured to paint the perfect still life and applied himself to his cause with great purpose, concentrating on depicting a few simple elements: vases containing roses or tulips set against a backdrop of brightly coloured fabrics bought from Whytock and Reid, the renowned Edinburgh decorators and furnishers. His vibrant use of colour was drawn from the palette of the Fauves, blue and orange were often the dominant colours with shadows of green, turquoise, grey and orange visible in the background.

His friend and fellow artist, Stanley Cursiter, wrote in his biography of Peploe that by the 1920s he ‘had now reached a stage at which his new technique was fully formed. The war years had been a time of preparation, intensive study, and concentration on the problems of colour, form, and lighting.

He was like a coiled spring awaiting merely the opportunity to expand’ (Stanley Cursiter, Peploe. An intimate memoir of an artist and of his work, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, London, 1947, p.51).

Samuel John Peploe, Pink Roses Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove, Glasgow © Culture and Sport Glasgow (museums)

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SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE rsa 1871 – Edinburgh – 1935

Still life with flowers, fruit and fan Signed S J Peploe • Painted circa 1920 Oil on canvas: 24 ¼ x 20 ¼ in / 61.6 x 51.4 cm • Framed size: 32 ½ x 28 ½ in / 82.6 x 72.4 cm PROVENANCE

Alexander Reid, Glasgow • Private collection, Scotland • Ian MacNicol, Glasgow • Duncan R Miller Fine Arts, London • Private collection, UK E XHIBITED

London, Duncan R Miller Fine Arts, The Scottish Colourists, 29 June – 29 July 2000

This striking, intricate still life dates from the early 1920s when Peploe was producing his most colourful works and reveals the sophistication with which he composed his compositions.

Against a graphic backdrop of black, white and emerald green, the artist depicts a central blue and white Chinese vase from which springs the undulating stems of the red, pink, yellow and white ranunculi echoing the folds of the fabric and the silhouette of the vase. In stark contrast to the curvilinear floral forms, the vivid straight lines of the folded fan and cobalt blue book are set at right angles creating a diamond shape on the bright yellow tablecloth. A black calligraphic flourish of ribbon is perfectly draped across the foreground in a bravura stroke of precision placement. Peploe’s use of colour is as calculated as the lines of his composition, each one carefully balanced and repeated in flower, fruit, fabric and foreground. Despite their obvious orchestration, each surface colour responds naturalistically to the subtlest nuance of reflection, responding in light and tone to its dramatic surroundings.

Peploe continued to explore the still life theme throughout his career and in 1929 he wrote to a fellow artist: ‘There is so much in mere objects, flowers, leaves, jugs, what-not – colours, forms, relation – I can never see mystery coming to an end’ (cited in Guy Peploe, SJ Peploe, 1871–1935, Lund Humphries, London, 2000, p.54).

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SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE rsa 1871 – Edinburgh – 1935

Roses Signed S J Peploe • Painted circa 1925 Oil on canvas: 20 x 16 in / 50.8 x 40.6 cm • Framed size: 28 x 24 in / 71.1 x 61 cm PROVENANCE

Miss Beatrice Proudfoot • Margaret Proudfoot-Young, then by descent E XHIBITED

Edinburgh, Aitken Dott & Son, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by S.J. Peploe, R.S.A., April – May 1936, catalogue no. 19

Peploe’s still life of yellow and pink roses is a superbly composed and subtle example of his mastery of the genre, demonstrating a sense of depth through the reflection of form and the repetition of tone. While maintaining a characteristically rich patterning of colour, seen especially in the pink roses, green leaves and red apple against a swathe of blue material (an expression of his admiration for Matisse), Peploe adds to the composition a restrained palette of greys in the elliptically shaped, reflective surfaces of the mirror, glass vases and the tablecloth. In contrast to these smooth, curved, pale planes, the deep, angular folds of the blue and green fabrics seem to mimic the jagged origami-like petals of the roses and their leaves. This is a sophisticated and delicate arrangement which presents Peploe at his creative and intellectual best.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

Samuel John Peploe’s greatest influence was French painting and he was particularly inspired by the developments of Fauvism. The eldest of the Scottish Colourists, he worked in an idiom remarkable for its painterly freedom and richness of colour. Together with Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, George Leslie Hunter and John Duncan Fergusson these four artists were characterised by their bold handling and use of colour.

Following their first exhibition in Paris in 1924 they were dubbed ‘Les Peintres de L’Ecosse Moderne’.

Peploe first studied at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1893, and then continued his training in Paris, at both the Académie Julian under Adolphe William Bouguereau (1825–1905), and the Académie Colarossi. At this time he was considerably impressed by the work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). He also admired Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), and seventeenth-century Dutch painters, especially Frans Hals (c1582–1666), whose work he saw on a visit to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam in 1895. During this period, Peploe led a cosmopolitan life, working in Britain, and travelling extensively throughout France, in the company of his friend and colleague, Fergusson, with whom he spent several holidays painting at Etaples, Paris Plage, Dunkirk, Berneval, Dieppe and Le Tréport.

In 1896 Peploe returned to Edinburgh and settled at his first studio in Shandwick Place, where the dark surroundings suited the sombre palette of his early still lifes, nudes and figure studies. He moved to a studio in Devon Place in 1900, where he developed a more sophisticated choice of subject matter, matched by an increasingly rich application of paint, and to York Place in 1905, where lighter space was reflected in the heightened tonality of his work.

32

JOHN DUNCAN FERGUSSON rba Leith 1874 – 1961 Glasgow

At the piano Signed J D Fergusson and dated 1902 on the reverse Oil on board: 12 ¼ x 10 ½ in / 31 x 26.7 cm • Framed size: 18 ½ x 16 ½ in / 47 x 41.9 cm PROVENANCE

A gift from the artist’s wife, Margaret Morris, to a private collection, UK

At the piano is an elegant interior most likely representing one of the artist’s sisters, Christina or Elizabeth Fergusson, and bears a striking resemblance to another work of the same period entitled Artist’s sister at the piano in the collection of The Fergusson Gallery, Perth. A refined study in delicate shades of cream and brown, At the piano has a warmer tonality than the earlier work with vibrant hints of red and green, presaging Fergusson’s future painting. It also displays a greater sense of immediacy; the sitter’s half-turn and direct gaze whilst touching the keys suggesting that we have interrupted her playing. The composition is also more successful, showing the full length of the figure, her elegant posture and the considered folds and highlights of her dress. The paint’s application though bold and expressive is highly finished and her naturalistic features more assured. Despite the attention lavished on the depiction of his sister, the painting is as much a portrait of the piano as of the woman portrayed.

The instrument was made by George Dettmer and Son, a pianoforte firm founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and purchased by the artist in 1902, the same year that he took his first studio in Picardy Place at the top of Leith Walk in Edinburgh and the year he painted the present work.

Fergusson referred to the piano in his ‘Memories of Peploe’ written in 1945 and published in the Scottish Art Review in 1962: ‘In the days of our early friendship most of my friends

were musicians. We were very much interested in the latest music and its relation to modern painting. S.J. played the piano most sympathetically. I had in my studio one of the first pianos signed by Dettmer. When he came, Peploe always played it with complete understanding of the difference between it and an iron-fronted grand. S.J. at the old piano is one of my happiest memories’ (J. D. Fergusson, ‘Memories of Peploe’, cited in M. Morris, The Art of J D Fergusson. A Biased Biography, Blackie: Glasgow and London, 1974, p.42).

We are grateful to Jenny Kinnear at The Fergusson Gallery, Perth for her assistance with the catalogue entry for this work.

John Duncan Fergusson, Artist’s sister at the piano c. 1900 © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland

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JOHN DUNCAN FERGUSSON rba Leith 1874 – 1961 Glasgow

Paris Signed, dated 1909 and inscribed ‘To Faith from JD Fergusson, Paris 13 Juin 1913 / Painted Paris 1909’ on the reverse Oil on board: 7 ½ x 9 ½ in / 19 x 24.1 cm • Framed size: 12 ¼ x 14 ¼ in / 31.1 x 36.2 cm PROVENANCE

Chipperfield Evans • Private collection, France

Fergusson first visited Paris around 1897 and continued to make annual visits there. In 1907 he moved to Paris and rented his first studio at 18 Boulevard Edgar Quintet. In 1909, the year in which he painted the present work, he was elected a Sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne. He left Paris in late 1913 to travel south to Cassis.

Fergusson produced many small oil sketches both in France and Scotland in the period circa 1900–1910. They included street scenes, landscapes and seascapes. He painted them en plein air using a special paint box that he had made out of a cigar box, which held small wooden panels, brushes and oil paints. In this way he was able to produce fluid oil sketches outdoors, inspired by the Impressionists. The brushwork, subject and approach in the present work is very much in line with these small sketches of this early period.

We are grateful to Jenny Kinnear at The Fergusson Gallery, Perth for writing the catalogue entry for this work.

John Duncan Fergusson, Street at night, 1907 Southampton City Council © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland / The Bridgeman Art Library

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JOHN DUNCAN FERGUSSON rba Leith 1874 – 1961 Glasgow

Grace McColl Signed J D Fergusson, dated 1930 and inscribed Paris on the reverse Oil on canvas: 36 x 29 in / 91.4 x 73.7 cm • Framed size: 46 x 38 ¾ in / 116.8 x 98.4 cm PROVENANCE

Harry McColl (the sitter’s husband), Paris • Margaret Morris • Private collection, UK purchased at the 1974 Fine Art Society exhibition E XHIBITED

Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, A Group of Works by JD Fergusson, June 1965, no. 14 • London, Fine Art Society, John Duncan Fergusson, September – October 1974, no. 76; this exhibition travelled to Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, October – November; Edinburgh, Fine Art Society, November 1974 L I T E R AT U R E

Victor Arwas, Art Deco, London, 1982, p.211, illustrated

It was during Fergusson’s early period in Paris from 1909 that he found friendship with the Scottish businessman Harry McColl, and his brother Bill. They became lifelong friends and Fergusson painted this portrait of Harry’s wife, Grace, in 1930.

attending the opening of Les Peintures Ecossais held at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris. This exhibition included work by Fergusson and the other three Scottish Colourists, as well as representing Telfer Bear and R O Dunlop.

A large number of the drawings made by Fergusson in these early years in Paris owe a lot to McColl. He was the artist’s companion and host on many visits to restaurants and other venues, which would otherwise have been outside Fergusson’s reach at the time. Writing his biography, Fergusson’s lifelong partner, the modern dance pioneer and artist Margaret Morris, wrote, ‘One of Fergus’s best friends, Harry McColl, a business man working in Paris, took him to the races at Chantilly, and to a smart café afterwards where he might make sketches ’ (M Morris, The Art of J D Fergusson, A Biased Biography, Glasgow & London, 1974, p.64).

As a great admirer of Fergusson’s work, McColl purchased a number of his paintings. This picture was one of sixteen from his estate that were exhibited in A Group of Works by JD Fergusson at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in June 1965. It was the first time they had been shown in Scotland as they had remained in Paris until McColl’s death in 1957. They were subsequently purchased by Margaret Morris.

McColl was Fergusson’s first visitor when he left Paris and travelled south, settling in Antibes in December 1913. He wrote to Margaret Morris in London, “Yes, we had a very good time together – walked and talked about everything; it’s really a terrific thing friendship…Harry was the first person to come to see me. He’s the man I like best.” (Letter from Fergusson to Margaret Morris, 6th December 1913, Antibes).

Later, in 1931, ‘Mr and Mrs McColl’ are noted in the press as

Grace McColl showcases Fergusson’s love of painting beautiful women. With the exception of his self-portraits, he focussed almost exclusively on female sitters from 1907 onwards, the majority of whom were amongst his wide circle of friends. From circa 1915, his portraits display a purity of form, rhythmic line and a fascination with the shapes of objects. This work is a wonderful example of how he used colour, pattern and costume to suggest the personality of the sitter. Grace McColl was evidently a very sophisticated, fashionable woman.

We are grateful to Jenny Kinnear at The Fergusson Gallery, Perth for writing the catalogue entry for this work.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

John Duncan Fergusson was the fourth and most independent member of the group of Scottish Colourists. Intellectually more receptive to the artistic ideas he encountered in Paris, he evolved a distinctive style of his own.

Fergusson abandoned the idea of studying medicine in order to devote himself to art. He first visited Paris in the mid-1890s and slightly later may have attended classes at the Académie Colarossi. During this period he was impressed by the works of Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828) in the Louvre and the Impressionists in the Salle Caillebotte in the Musée du Luxembourg. He visited Morocco in 1899 and Spain in 1901, the year in which he became a member of the Royal Society of British Artists.

Fergusson held his first one-man exhibition at the Baillie Gallery, London in 1905 and settled in Paris two years later, where he befriended the Anglo-American circle of artists. He was greatly influenced by Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and the Fauves which resulted in the brightening of his palette and a new boldness of line. From 1910 onwards, a new theme dominated his work, that of the female nude, embodied in pictures characterised by their rich colouring and rhythmic, geometric patterning. One of these works entitled Rhythm gave rise to a literary magazine of the same title, of which he became art editor in 1911. He met Margaret Morris, his future wife in 1913, and visited Cassis with Peploe the same year.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Fergusson returned to London; he painted a series of Portsmouth Docks in 1918. He held two exhibitions in New York in 1926 and 1928 and returned to Paris in 1929, where he remained until the outbreak of the Second World War. Fergusson moved back to Glasgow in 1940 where he founded the New Art Club, out of which emerged the New Scottish Group in 1942. His first retrospective exhibition was held at the McLellan Galleries in 1948, and he was made an honorary LL D of the University of Glasgow in 1950.

35

GEORGE LESLIE HUNTER Rothesay 1877 – 1931 Glasgow

Still life with a silver teapot Signed Hunter • Painted circa 1915–20 Oil on canvas: 27 x 22 in / 68.6 x 55.9 cm • Framed size: 36 x 31 in / 91.4 x 78.7 cm PROVENANCE

Private collection, Scotland

George Leslie Hunter held his first one-man show at the gallery of Alexander Reid in 1916 to rapturous reviews: ‘He has three or four examples of still life that are superlatively strong. Such work is bound to live, for they show a mastery of form and colour that takes one back to the triumphs of the Dutchmen’ (The Bailie, cited in T J Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, Faber and Faber, London, 1937, p.76). The formal arrangement, vivacious colouring and strong chiaroscuro of the present work, certainly evoke the illustrious precedent of the Dutch seventeenth century masters, Willem Kalf and Jan Davidsz de Heem, as well as the French eighteenth century painter Jean-Simeon ’ Chardin, whom Hunter had the opportunity to study at the Glasgow Art Gallery.

The vital, classic beauty of Willem Kalf’s sumptuous still lifes was particularly influential, his mature work combining gold or silver vessels, cut glass and fruit soberly arranged against a dark background, stimulating Hunter’s early compositions.

Hunter orchestrates this glorious still life around the central silver teapot which reflects the light and colours of the visual feast that surrounds it. The luxuriant swathe of dark material loosely covering the wall provides a perfect foil to the dazzling reflective surfaces of the silver platter, teapot and wine glasses.

At the top and bottom of the canvas, Hunter introduces bright, bold colours in the blue tablecloth and green, draped curtain, which is echoed in the grapes and in tune with the brilliant hues of the oranges and lemons. The rough, matte texture of this fruit is skilfully contrasted with the smooth, metallic sheen of the silverware they encircle, as well as the glossy grapes. The richer, more lustrous reds of a cherry and plum on the left are

paralleled on the right by a single flower almost dipped inside a wine glass, whose impressionistic stem follows the diagonal line of the foreground knife.

Hunter’s stylish arrangement, with arresting contrasts of light and dark, colour and tone as well as the vitality of his impasted application, suggests it was executed before 1920. The artist’s broad, enthusiastic technique and unerring sense of bold, vibrant colour was also a result of frequent visits to Paris, where he was able to admire the work of Post-Impressionist masters Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne.

George Leslie Hunter, Still life with white jug © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

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GEORGE LESLIE HUNTER Rothesay 1877 – 1931 Glasgow

Still life with tulips and fruit Signed L Hunter • Painted circa 1929 Oil in board: 22 x 18 in / 55.9 x 45.7 cm • Framed size: 30 x 26 in / 76.2 x 66 cm PROVENANCE

T & R Annan & Sons, Ltd, Glasgow • Private collection, Scotland • Richard Green, London, 2003 • Private collection, USA, 2003

With its brightness of colour and bold composition, Still life with tulips and fruit is a powerful work in which the very essence of Hunter’s notions of painting are expressed in the intelligence of the colour harmony and arrangement of objects.

The handling of the paint and colour, suggests that this painting was executed towards the end of the 1920s after Hunter’s return from France. In 1929 Hunter was encouraged by his friend and biographer, Tom Honeyman, to concentrate on painting still life and this was to give him new and more focused direction in his work. With a ready market for Hunter’s still lifes of flowers, he painted over a dozen large and ambitious canvases during this period, with much enthusiasm. Hunter loved nothing more than to paint flowers and he relished the prospect of devoting his time to still life painting. There was a renewed vibrancy and freshness to his pictures, a clarity of colour and a striking contrast in his work, which is exceptional.

In the early 1920s Hunter’s paint application had become rather tentative and lacking commitment, but later in the decade his paint was applied with spirit and force. As Honeyman noted, ‘Technique, as mere technique, did not interest him; it was the vision behind that mattered. With all his vigour and impetuosity, his impulsive artistic urge was instinctively right in choice of colours and tones. It is this unerring sense of colour that made Hunter the artist he became’ (cited in T J Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, Faber & Faber, London, 1937, p.211).

Unusually Still life with tulips and fruit has a pale background of white tablecloth and painted panelling, giving the colours a luminosity and accentuating the slender forms of the tulips.

The composition recalls those of Samuel Peploe painted in the 1920s, but the paint application and texture is very different, suggesting a refracted shimmering light.

George Leslie Hunter, Tulips © Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum (Warwick District Council)

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GEORGE LESLIE HUNTER Rothesay 1877 – 1931 Glasgow

Boats and figure, Largo Signed L Hunter Oil on panel: 7 ¾ x 11 ¼ in / 19.7 x 28.6 cm • Framed size: 13 ¾ x 17 in / 34.9 x 43.2 cm PROVENANCE

Alex Reid, Glasgow • Mrs Jean Stewart, Scotland

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GEORGE LESLIE HUNTER Rothesay 1877 – 1931 Glasgow

Figures on the pier, Largo Signed L Hunter Oil on panel: 7 ¾ x 11 ¼ in / 19.7 x 28.6 cm • Framed size: 13 ¾ x 17 in / 34.9 x 43.2 cm PROVENANCE

Alex Reid, Glasgow • Mrs Moyra Donald, Scotland

Hunter began painting coastal scenes in Fife from 1919 until 1926, one of his favourite locations being the picturesque fishing village of Lower Largo, on the north side of the Firth of Forth. ‘He spent most of the summer in Largo (Fife), where he did some of the finest paintings of his career. The open-air life was of great benefit to him physically and mentally and his letters are those of a man who feels himself ‘on top of the world’ (T J Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, Faber and Faber, London, 1937, p.93).

Hunter’s interest in the light and colour specific to Fife was to effect a marked change on his handling of paint as well as his palette. In contrast to the restrained colours and tightening of techique apparent in the work of his fellow Colourists at this time, Hunter exhibits an energetic enthusiasm of execution and a brightening of tone comparable to the lightness of his mood. Having found such an inspirational subject, he sought to represent it in all its glory, capturing different conditions of light, the ever-changing hues of the sea and the character of the tide in oil and watercolour, as well as sketches in ink and crayon.

Hunter’s passion for this place can be seen in these two idyllic harbour scenes depicted from the same vantage point at different times of day. Both works feature a high horizon and a wide expanse of water interupted by natural and man-made promontories. Each delight in the brightly coloured gunwales of small wooden rowing boats and the choppy texture of the sea.

Though vigourously applied, the paint is superbly controlled, descriptive of shape and volume as well as surface.

G L Hunter, A Summer Day, Largo Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove Glasgow © Culture and Sport Glasgow (museums)

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

Often considered the most natural of the Scottish Colourists, George Leslie Hunter was primarily a self-taught artist, renowned for his bohemian appearance, eccentric behaviour and above all, his unwavering devotion to art.

The son of a dispensing chemist, he first attended Rothesay Academy, but in 1892 his father decided to emigrate to California, where Hunter remained until 1906. During these years he worked as an illustrator for Californian newspapers and magazines, and it was his innate skill as a draughtsman that was later to provide the foundation of his talent.

In 1922, Hunter visited Paris, Venice, Florence and the Riviera Coast, and at the latter was often joined by his friend and colleague John Duncan Fergusson. Following their return, he settled in Fife and painted still lifes and landscapes, many of which were inspired by the house boats at Loch Lomond.

Hunter spent much time during subsequent years in the South of France, painting at Saint Paul de Vence, Cassis and St Tropez between 1927–1929. His visits abroad proved highly productive and he exhibited much of his recent work at the Ferargil Galleries, New York in 1929, an exhibition that won him considerable critical acclaim.

His first one man exhibition was due to open in San Francisco in 1906, but all the works destined for his show were destroyed by the earthquake. Devastated by this disaster, he returned to Scotland where he became acquainted with Alexander Reid, at whose gallery he held an exhibition in 1916.

The instability of Hunter’s health however, seemed insurmountable and that same year he suffered the most serious of his breakdowns. Although he continued to paint and produced some of his finest and most sensitive works during these later years, Hunter died after an unsuccessful operation in 1931.

39

FRANCIS CAMPBELL BOILEAU CADELL rsa rws 1883 – Edinburgh – 1937

Iona looking towards Lunga Signed FCB Cadell • Painted circa 1926 Oil on panel: 14 ¾ x 17 ¾ in / 37.5 x 45.1 cm • Framed size: 22 x 25 in / 55.9 x 63.5 cm PROVENANCE

David Munro Fraser, Iona, purchased directly from the artist, then by descent

Following his first visit in 1912, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell visited Iona, a small island off the west coast of Scotland, almost every summer for the rest of his life, exploring the extraordinary quality of light and its effects upon countless combinations of sky, sea, stone and sand. In the present work the artist records the stretch of sea between the North Shore of Iona and the Treshnish Isle of Lunga, North West of Mull.

Cadell painted predominately within the northern bays of Iona and recorded this part more extensively than any other artist.

The island was to have a profound effect on Cadell and at his encouragement fellow Colourist, S J Peploe, who later joined him on his regular visits.

Cadell ‘was fascinated by the brilliant sparkling colours of the water, and by the contrasting tones of rocks and shoreline; by the almost mesmeric perspective of distant islands, and above all by the rapidly changing light. It was his uncanny ability to instantly capture that particular light and precise colour, however fleeting, that ensured that the island was a constant source of inspiration and fulfilment for him’ (Tom Hewlett, Cadell, The Life and Works of a Scottish Colourist 1883–1937, Canongate Books, Edinburgh, 1988, p.34).

For the artist’s friend and writer, T J Honeyman, ‘It was in Iona that Cadell lived his fuller life as an artist. And it is to his work there that the Scottish colour tradition label may be most fittingly applied’ (T J Honeyman, Three Scottish Colourists, Thomas Nelson & Sons, London, 1950, p.90).

We are grateful to Alice Strang, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Fiona Menzies, Fiona Johnston, Tracey Hawkins, Glasgow Museums and Philip Macleod Coupe for their assistance with the cataloguing of this work.

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, Lunga from Iona © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

Flamboyant, eccentric and witty, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell was born into a prosperous Edinburgh family and encouraged to train as a painter by Arthur Melville, a leading member of the Glasgow School.

He attended the Royal Scottish Academy School from 1897 – 1899 and spent the following eight years in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian from 1899 – 1903. Whilst in Paris, Cadell came under a variety of influences including the Impressionists, Henri Matisse and the Fauves. He also visited the great Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) exhibitions; however, perhaps the greatest influence during this period was James Abbott McNeil Whistler (1834–1903), whose Memorial Exhibition he saw at the Luxembourg in 1905.

Cadell spent some time in Munich in 1907, and returned to Edinburgh in 1909. The following year he made a trip to Venice, financed by Sir Patrick Ford, who became one of his most important patrons. During the First World War he served as a Private in the Royal Scots and then obtained a commission in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

After the war, Cadell adopted a new intensity of colour and the use of thickly applied paint. This stylistic development is most evident in his pictures of Edinburgh interiors, which, with their flat areas of boldly juxtaposed colours, reveal most clearly the influence of the Fauves and Matisse.

From about 1913 until his health began to deteriorate in 1935, Cadell made Iona his second home. He acquired a croft and visited the island annually in order to paint the landscape out of doors. Many of these landscapes were painted over a wet white ground and this technique resulted in a luminosity and brilliance of colour, one of the most striking features of his work.

Cadell was a founder and life-long member of Edinburgh’s Society of Eight from its inception in 1912. He was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1935, and was made a Royal Scottish Academician in 1936, one year prior to his death.

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