Rayonanthus on a Pale Blue Ground by Anne Redpath (1895-1965) depicts a still life captured with rough, feathered brush strokes of a bouquet of white flowers against a light blue and white background. A dryer brush technique is used throughout the work, showing each individual stroke that Redpath made in the bright shades of blue, yellow, white, and green colour. The flowers blend partially with the background, the vase they are in almost completely enmeshed into the strokes of white, while the petals of the flowers appear as bright white rays against the blue, providing the namesake for this painting. 

The title of the work sounds as if it is the scientific name of the flowers that are its subject, but in fact this is not their scientific name and possibly a reference to Redpath's chosen technique in the flowers that make their petals appear ray-like against the blue background. Redpath's work was well known for a vibrant use of colour, present here in the lightness of the blue and the bright white in contrast. The influence of her father with an interest in texture, similar to tweed, is present throughout this work in the way Redpath has created almost a woven-like background with layers of blue, black, white, and green overlapping with each other. The dryer brush technique as well combines with this influence to create the roughened texture, that also characterises tweed. 

Anne Redpath OBE RSA ARA ARWS, 1895-1965

Born in Galashiels, the daughter of a tweed designer, Anne Redpath overcame initial parental opposition to the study of art on condition that she also trained as a teacher. In 1913 she enrolled at Edinburgh College of Aer, where she was taught by, among others, David Alison, Henry Lintott and D.M. Sutherland. The college awarded her a travelling scholarship in 1919, and Redpath went to Brussels, Bruges, Paris, Florence - where she lived for several months - and Siena, where she was impressed greatly by the work of the Sienese Primitives, particularly the brothers Lorenzetti.

In 1920 she married James Beattie Michie, an architect with the war Graves Commission in France, spending fourteen years bringing up a family, first in northern France and then on the Riviera, painting whenever she could. She and her three sons returned to Scotland in 1934, living in Hawick, where she had been brought up. She moved to Edinburgh in 1949. On her return to Scotland she took up painting again in earnest, forced to earn a living from it. Until she travelled in Spain in 1951 her paintings were mainly still lifes and landscapes, but after that visit her art developed a new strength and drama, her handling of paint was much freer, and her work developed a more abstract quality.

Colour and texture fascinated Redpath. The influence of her father's work remained with her, as she observed in later life in an exhibition catalogue: "I do, with a spot of red or yellow in harmony with grey, what my father did with his tweed." In the last twelve years of her life she painted in Corsica, the Canary Islands, Portugal, Amsterdam and Venice. Serious illness in 1955 and 1959 seemed only to intensify the emotion with which she charged her canvas.

Redpath painted highly decorative works in which simple colour harmonies dominate. revealing the influence of the French post-Impressionist, in particular Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard and Vuillard.