The Creation of a New Language of Colour in European Art

By James Knox, 06.02.2025

Samuel J Peploe, Luxembourg Gardens, (c1910). The Fleming Collection

The Fleming Collection's exhibition The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives, celebrates the centenary of the first group show in the United Kingdom of the four Scottish Colourists which was staged in 1925 by the visionary Glasgow dealer, Alexander Reid, at the Leicester Galleries in London. The reputation of the Colourists, SJ Peploe, JD Fergusson, Lesley Hunter and FCB Cadell, has waxed and waned over the past hundred years, but in Scotland at least, they are now recognised as four of the most talented, experimental and distinctive artists in the story of Scottish art. But in their lifetimes, they were seen in the much wider context of contemporary European art, hence their very first group show in 1924 was staged, also by Reid, in Paris, who then took them not to Glasgow or Edinburgh, but to London.

The exhibition at Dovecot sets them in the context of their European, English, Irish and Welsh contemporaries. As a result, their work can now be seen alongside the French Fauve painters, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, leaders of the group which sparked the colour revolution in 1905 in Paris, goading one critic to label them 'wild beasts' (Les Fauves). Their radicalism is spotlighted in the exhibition by Derain’s revolutionary Fauve work, 'Pool of London', (1906) lent by Tate. Other key comparisons, thanks to institutional and private loans, include works by the Bloomsbury Group innovator Duncan Grant, as well as standout examples, also lent by Tate, from Walter Sickert’s Fitzroy Street Group of London based ‘Fauve’ painters.

Furthermore, the exhibition investigates a possible ‘Celtic’ connection in the primal response to colour by Welsh artists, Augustus John and John Dickson Innes, and Ireland’s Roderic O’Conor, suggesting a continuity between the approach taken by these artists and that of the Scots. 

A significant group of previously neglected women artists is also brought into the limelight, such as Anne Estelle Rice, Margaret Morris and Jessica Dismorr, who were part of Peploe’s and Fergusson’s bohemian circle in pre-WW1 Paris. Above all, the Fleming Collection’s outstanding holdings of Scottish Colourists stands as the anchor and inspiration of the show.  

This array of Colourist paintings offers an unparalleled opportunity to challenge conventions around who, among the avant-garde pack of UK artists inspired by French innovation, should be considered the leading radical painters from 1905 to the outbreak of war in 1914. The exhibition’s ambitious timeline covers the impact of Cubism and Vorticism on this group of artists immediately before and after the outbreak of WW1.  The culmination of the show is a celebration of  the coming together of the Scottish Colourists as a distinct group in the 1920s and 1930s, marked out by the continuing influence of both French colour and Scottish light upon their work as painters of landscape, still life, and interiors.

The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives is exhibiting at Dovecot, Edinburgh, 7th February - 28th June 2025

Tickets £12 (concessions available)