An exhibition at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh will place for the first time the Scottish Colourists—the artists Samuel John Peploe, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, Leslie Hunter and John Duncan Fergusson—in the context of their UK and European contemporaries.
Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives, organised in partnership with the Fleming Collection, is the brainchild of Fleming’s curator emeritus (and a former managing director of The Art Newspaper) James Knox. “It sprang out of a conversation I had: I said I would love to do a show that compared the four Scottish Colourists to the Bloomsbury painters,” he says. But two of the Colourists, “Samuel Peploe and J.D. Fergusson, lived in Paris, so they were more connected to what was going on there than, say, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant”. Therefore the show looks at both British and European influences.
“The early section is about what was going on in Scotland in about 1900 to 1905,” Knox says. “Then the show moves to Paris and London in the years up until the First World War, 1905 to 1914, with the dual impact of the Modern masters—[such as] Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne—as well as the Fauve painters, notably Matisse and Derain, on the Scots, who were by then living in Paris.” The exhibition will also look at the European influence on the Scots’ English, Welsh and Irish contemporaries, Knox says. Works by Augustus John and the talented but lesser-known John Dickson Innes as well as Ireland’s Roderic O’Conor will be in this section of the show.
John Duncan Fergusson’s Blue Nude (around 1909-10) © Courtesy of The Fergusson Gallery; Perth & Kinross Council
Also in the exhibition will be examples from the 1912 post-Impressionist exhibition at Grafton Galleries in London. “Roger Fry and Clive Bell curated an English section and ignored everyone else in this exhibition, apart from themselves!” Knox says. “Roger Fry was chosen by himself, Virginia Bell was chosen by her husband, Duncan Grant was chosen by Fry and Bell because they all knew Duncan…”
There will be a small section on the advent of Cubism and semi abstraction in the show too. Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Composition (1915) will be shown along with a small André Derain watercolour titled Nature morte au pichet de grés (1910) and Three Submarines (1918), a Vorticist-inspired war painting by Fergusson, which will be on loan from the Perth Art Gallery.
The final section of the exhibition is called “The Art of Peace”. “This was when the four Colourists came together as a group, and how everyone stepped back from mad innovation on the brink of pre-World War I, and later settled down into a more conservative approach,” Knox says. Examples dating from the 1920s include Vanessa Bell’s Baie de l’Arène (1927) and Leslie Hunter’s Peonies in a Chinese Vase (1925).
Around 110 works will be on display, with about half lent by the Fleming Collection and the others from a wide variety of institutions and some private collectors. A particular prize is Derain’s renowned Fauvist work, The Pool of London (1906) from Tate, as well as key works by Bell and Grant, along with examples from Walter Sickert’s Camden Town series.
“This is the first ever exhibition to set the radical Scots in the context of their UK and Irish contemporaries—and offers an opportunity for a fresh assessment of the overall achievement of individual artists as well as that of their networks,” Knox says.
• Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, 7 February-28 June
