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PINK ROSES AND AN OPEN BOOK

measurements note
45.5 by 40.5 cm., 18 by 16 in.

signed l.r.: peploe

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Alex Reid & Lefevre, London;
Private collection

NOTE

Pink Roses and an Open Book was painted c.1931 the wonderful composition being amongst his most dynamic and beautiful later studies of roses, the flower with which he is most associated. The rich colouring and dramatic juxtaposition of the vase and scattered fruit and the geometric lines of the drapes and open pages of the book combine to create a rhythmic harmony of colour and form which is typical of the best work of this period. A comparable picture, identical in size is A Still Life of Roses c.1931 (Perth Museum and Art Gallery) in which an open book is also included, although in a more peripheral position, its place taken by a teacup. Books are also prominent in at least two other contemporary paintings Still Life with a Plaster Cast (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) and The Statuette (formerly in the collection of A. J. McNeill Reid).

Throughout his career Peploe strove to paint the perfect still life and he got nearest to this ideal in the 1920s. It had been his first love and his first serious achievements had been in still life. His temperament made him ideally suited to the task. His calm reasoning and thoughtful manner enabled him to make a careful analysis of the problems which face the still life painter and he set about resolving them in a series of works which includes many of his most satisfying paintings. In a letter written to a fellow artist he said, "There is so much in mere objects, flowers, leaves, Jugs, what not- colours, forms, relation- I can never see mystery coming to an end" (Stanley Cursiter, Peploe; An Intimate Memoir of an Artist and of his Work, 1947, p. 73).

His series of still lifes can be viewed as sequential steps along a path to sought after perfection, they can be seen as stimulating and highly individual. Peploe regarded them as serious works, requiring a considered intellectual effort allied to a careful hand and a sure sense of colour and pattern. Peploe's contribution to the genre of still life painting is probably without equal in British art in the twentieth century. Walter Sickert, who had been invited by Alexander Reid to write an introduction to the catalogue of the 1925 exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London, had a high opinion of these new paintings. He commented "In his earlier work Mr Peploe had carried on a certain kind of delicious skill to a pitch of virtuosity that might have led to mere repetition, and his present orientation has certainly been a kind of rebirth. He has transferred his unit of attention from attenuated and exquisite gradations of tone to no less skilfully related colour. And by relating all his lines with frankness to 180 degrees of two right angles, he is able to capture and digest a wider field of vision than before. And time, as the poet sings, is an important element in the gathering of roses. And it is probably for this reason that, obviously beautiful as was Mr Peploe's earlier quality, his present one will establish itself as the more beautiful of the two".

More than any other member of the Colourists Peploe was influenced by the radical work of the Cubists and Fauves and he developed a way of a painting more closely akin to that of Cezanne with his bold colour and delineated tone. Peploe's still lifes produced in the early 1920s investigated the possibilities of artistic expression in terms of pure colour and flattened pictorial space. His work is not concerned with clever representations of distance or of light, there is no meaning to be read into the flower symbolism of his pictures and there is no deep-rooted psychological mystery to his work. His still lifes portray the simple but fascinating and stunning qualities of colour and form in perhaps their most pure form.