From around 1904, Peploe and Fergusson made annual expeditions to the fashionable resorts on the Normandy coast such as Paris-Plage (now Le Touquet) where they painted on the beach equipped with pochades or small wooden paint boxes which carried panels slotted into the lid, which served as an easel. As time went on these plein air sketches, originally painted in rich creamy tones, became bolder in colour and more vigorously handled in an overtly modern way, suggesting an awakening to contemporary developments in France led by the fauves.  

Samuel John Peploe RA, 1871-1935

Born in Edinburgh, the son of a banker, the young Samuel Peploe resisted a career in the law to spend four years attending art schools divided between the Royal Scottish Academy and the Académie Julian in Paris. Settling in Edinburgh in the early 1900s, Peploe established his reputation as a painter of still lives and innovative portraits influenced by the breakthrough early moderns, Édouard Manet and James McNeill Whistler.

Meanwhile his love of France and friendship with J.D. Fergusson led to annual visits across the Channel. Peploe wrote admiringly of the French: ‘They always remind me of the Gaelic- so frank and open…They so enjoy life largely in an animal way.’ He spoke from experience as his long-term girlfriend and future wife, Margaret Mackay, was Gaelic, hailing from the Isle of Barra.

The revolutionary Fauve painters who took Europe by storm in 1905 unlocked the reserved Scot’s wild side. Peploe’s move to Paris with his family in 1910 inspired a series radical ‘colourist’ paintings, which were deemed too difficult by his Edinburgh dealer, who promptly dropped him.

Unfit for military service, Peploe’s wartime paintings reveal the influence of Cézanne. The advent of peace saw his resurgence as a colourist establishing his reputation as a master of still lifes and interiors of theatrical stillness and beauty. Almost every year he visited Iona with Cadell producing seascapes which capture the unique clarity of Scottish light.

By the time of his death in 1935, aged 66, Peploe was hailed as ‘the real leader of the forward movement in Scotland.’