S.J. Peploe, Still Life (c.1906), City Art Centre, Edinburgh. Oil on panel, 26.5 x 35 cms.
Literature: Strang, Cumming, Fowle, 'S.J. Peploe', Yale University Press, 2012, plate 3
Throughout his career Peploe indefatigably experimented with still life. Early examples in the genre are often set against dark, indeterminate backgrounds, against which richly coloured flowers, peeled fruit and lustrous metallic objects are thrown into sharp relief. Aside from clear affinities with Dutch still life, many of Peploe’s early examples accord with Manet’s still lifes in their intense saturation of colour and boldly handled shadows, particularly in the use of thick, graphic black lines to outline objects. In a letter to a fellow artist written in 1929, Peploe wrote: ‘there is so much in mere objects, flowers, leaves, jugs, what not – colours, forms relation – I can never see mystery coming to an end.’*
*quoted in Stanley Cursiter, Peploe: an intimate memoir of an artist and his work, Nelson, London, 1947
Image courtesy of www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/Venues/City-Art-Centre
S.J. Peploe, Still Life (c.1906-7) The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Oil on panel, 24.5 x 35 cms.
G.L. Hunter, Still Life with Half Peeled Lemon (1919), The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. Oil on canvas, 70 x 56 cms.
After the First World War, Hunter rented a studio in Glasgow. His pre-1920 still lifes are generally characterised by their dark backgrounds such as in this example, and a richer palette than he favoured during the War. The Half Peeled Lemon recalls Dutch still lives of the sort Hunter would have encountered in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove, and at the McManus Art Gallery, Dundee.
Image courtesy of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow Gallery and Museum www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian
G.L. Hunter, Still Life (c.1930), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cms.
Image courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland www.nationalgalleries.org