I am finished with the colour system…& await a new development…one just keeps going like a machine. I have to paint.
Still Life - Apples & Jar (1912-16)
There are a number of artists that look like nothing more or less than a stereotypical accountant. I’m thinking of guys like Arthur Rackham & Antony Gormley for instance. From the minds of all these incredibly square-looking fellows often comes the most innovative & interesting art. & so it is for Samuel Peploe. There’s a photo of Peploe that shows an art school class where he has selected a moustache & cravat combination as his look. A part of him chooses to look like this. He’s building up an image, a public image. Perhaps in 1893 the look was downright avant garde.
Surely most municipal galleries in Scotland will have acquired a Peploe - he’s so prolific - & each of those galleries will be thoroughly delighted about having it. It makes me happy to think he, in particular, came from Scotland, despite his travels (most artists then seem to have left at some point in their careers) because of his imaginative approach to colour & style of painting, his need to keep moving forward with his art. There is something deeply European about Peploe. There are many contradictions in how we view Peploe & perhaps in how he viewed his own work. Possibly it was simply a fearlessness about progressing his work. He was a machine. He had to paint. No matter where that would take him.
There were apparently also contradictions between his public & private personalities. Samuel’s grandson, Guy Peploe is the director of Scotland’s oldest commercial art gallery, The Scottish Gallery. The gallery recently presented an expo (& accompanying book) representing the studio days of Peploe. Guy Peploe has also written a lavishly illustrated biography of the grandfather he never knew, wherein he tells us that as staid & aloof as Samuel appeared to the public, his family found a man with a sense of humour that was fun & entertaining.
Still Life (1913)
As a SJ Peploe fan in the 21st Century, much of his work still seems ground-breaking & new. He’s perhaps known best for his still life paintings & sea- & landscapes. Many have a distinctive Cézanne-esque blue or black outline to the different elements, denoting the often rapid, often impasto placement of paint on canvas. You can’t effectively produce paintings with such confident & hurried brushstrokes without endless practice & familiarity with the materials. This was the case with Samuel. Despite starting his working life with a solicitors’ firm, he could be found outdoors drawing on street corners in his breaks.
The quote from Peploe at the start contains some big words for one of a group of artists known as the “Scottish Colourists.” But this is what you see when you follow the timeline of his works. You can trace development & change in all artists’ oeuvre over time but after conducting even a cursory study of Peploe’s works you will be presented with an ability to roughly date what you’re viewing – was it early 1900s? Or 1910s? Or later? Pay not very close attention & you’ll soon be able to tell.
Self Portrait (c. 1900)
Although he’s labelled a Colourist - & correctly so for the group he was associated with – he’s a stylist, as was his great friend & fellow Colourist JD Fergusson. Like Fergusson, he’s not reaching for perfection; he’s after constant change.
Yet again though, he confounds us. He wants to develop, yet he returns to the same places, the same subjects, uses the same models & in this way. But it turns out it’s a good move as he is able to affect continuous variation in his style, use of colour & application of paint.
The names of his paintings are often nondescript because he’s not trying to say something. He’s trying to see what can be done, what can be achieved in paint. His still life paintings in particular show the most marked changes. At first, they are almost like landscapes (although extremely accomplished & well composed) – wide, on a single level, expansive, with plenty of space. Later though, as they become more abstracted, almost Cubist in places, the arrangement is much tighter, there’s less space, less room for manoeuvre or error & the placement of the different shapes & objects becomes more impressive. He doesn’t put a brushstroke wrong. He now fully understands the power of composition. He no longer has to show off with it to astonish us. He is now an expert.
I did think quite hard about what my favourite Peploe painting might be & I couldn’t come to a conclusion. I like the idea of him, his contradictions & his ever-changing style. Therefore if someone was to say I could have one for myself (no-one is going to say this) & I could only pick one, I would have no hesitation in selecting one of his self-portraits of 1900. In the tradition of many great portrait painters, he paints himself at his work, setting out what he does & who he is. You can almost smell the tobacco – he would find smoking helped him think & consider & solve the problem of creating the next image.
But this image, holding our gaze in a fug of perfectly-placed smoke he paints. Everything is clearly, swiftly, deliberately & economically defined in thick impasto & not a brush-hair is out of place. It’s a perfect summing-up of his abilities as well as his life & self-image. We can see the smock covers his snowy white shirt & smart tie. We need no more detail that what he has set down. Our brain fills in the rest.
In a short autobiography from 1915, Peploe encapsulates the World of Art in a single sentence, where many – myself included – have failed. Although in the context of the piece he wrote, he may have meant that he had to get on with working considerably harder after the births of his sons, he will also have understood the other potential meanings of the stand-alone statement:
There is no end to Art.
Samuel John Peploe, we salute you.
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