Still life with tulips

SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE RSA

1871 - Edinburgh - 1935

Ref: CB 231

Still life with tulips

Signed lower left: Peploe

Oil on canvas: 20 x 20 in / 50.8 x 50.8 cm

Painted circa 1918

Provenance:

Mr & Mrs John B Rankin

Lyon & Turnbull, 10th December 2015, lot 51;

private collection, Stirlingshire

Exhibited:

Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, SJ Peploe: A commemorative exhibition, 26th June-8th September 1985, no.78, as Still life: tulips with black background, lent by Mr and Mrs John B Rankin

This exceptional painting, with its square format and sophisticated black background, recalls the elegance of the artist’s celebrated Edwardian still lifes at the turn of the century, including Coffee and liqueur (Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery), Peonies (National Galleries of Scotland) and Still life (Edinburgh Museums and Galleries), in which Peploe paid homage to the Dutch Old Master, Frans Hals and the modern master, Edouard Manet. In this strikingly dramatic, almost Art Deco design, the geometric shapes of the dark background and cropped, white-covered table, highlight the curved forms and bright colours of the glass vase and tulips to arresting effect. Tulips were Peploe’s preferred flower at this time, often bought from nearby Princes Street, their strong colours and curvilinear stems and leaves brilliantly captured in this bravura presentation. Following the planes of the tilted table, the flowers reach from the translucent, spherical vase across the canvas towards the right where five more flowers in bright red, pale mauve and yellow, stretch up to meet them.

In 1917 Peploe moved into a studio at 54 Shandwick Place, previously occupied by the artist James Patterson (1854-1932) and close to his first studio at no.24, where he remained until 1934. Alice Strang writes in the exhibition catalogue for the artist’s retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2012, ‘The still lifes which Peploe painted during the period between approximately 1918 and 1923 are the works for which he is best known…because of their immediate and continuing commercial success. Peploe changed his technique, adopting an absorbent gesso ground and reducing the amount of medium in his paint. He pushed his use of colour to the extreme and obsessively arranged objects – such as blue-and-white Chinese porcelain vases, filled initially with tulips and then usually with roses; fans; books; fruit in a variety of dishes…to create finely balanced compositions.’[1]

Peploe was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1918 and his Tulips,1923 (Tate), was purchased for the British public in 1927, the year he was appointed a full member of the RSA.

[1] Alice Strang, SJ Peploe, exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2012, p.23.