Still Life with Melon and Fruit to go on show

A Scottish art gallery is holding an exhibition entitled Still Life throughout May.

Guy Peploe, managing director the The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, has selected works from the subject of Still Life.

In art history this subject has produced many masterpieces, countless sub-genres, and lot of efficient, academic works which might not win the Turner Prize but give great pleasure in the domestic realm.

Still Life is often the subject chosen by the petit maitres: Van Huysum, Chardin, Morandi and own Samuel John Peploe, explorations of symbolism, exercises in the pursuit of significant form. In Scotland the still-lives of the Edinburgh School from Gillies and Redpath to Blackadder have added considerably to the genre, in Glasgow the practice of belle peinture continues to thrive. This selection is modest, personal and focused on Scotland, on the modern period and contemporary examples.

Artists Included; Mary Armour, William Crosbie, Victoria Crowe, J D Fergusson, William Gillies, John Houston, William MacTaggart, Christine McArthur, Ellen Malcolm, Alberto Morrocco, Leon Morrocco, Denis Peploe, S J Peploe, Anne Redpath, Duncan Shanks.

Guy Peploe has written a Haiku for each picture within the exhibition.

A short lecture with Guy discussing the work in this exhibition is being held, and click HERE to book tickets through eventbrite, or contact The Gallery.

S J Peploe’s painting Still Life with Melon and Fruit, c.1913, will be on show, having been sold recently. A painting from the same period is currently on show in the Tate, as part of the exhibition Van Gogh & Britain.

Guy said: ‘Peploe spent time in France most years from the mid-1890’s, having studied there for most of 1894. He would certainly have seen the Van Gogh exhibition at Bernheim Jeune in 1901, where other works would have been displayed regularly.

‘Living in Montparnasse in a tiny studio apartment at 278 Ble Raspail with Margaret and baby Willy from the Autumn of 1910, back from Royan, he worked on several still lives, particularly of tulips, which are now recognised as some of his most urgent, modernist paintings. Painted in a rich impasto, the paint in furrows, contained with strong outlines these works owe a clear debt to Van Gogh in terms of technique and palette, but go further; they are less naturalistic and certainly in Still life, with Melon and Fruit, tend towards a cubist analysis of form, albeit energised with the swift, sure laying in of the paint.’

Still Life will run from 1-29 May at The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street,  Edinburgh, EH3 6HZ.

Click HERE for more details.