I am looking forward to giving the Scottish Colourists talk ‘A Century of the Scottish Colourists‘ to accompany the Fleming Collection exhibition The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh on 22 April 2025.
oil on board, 22 x 27cm, The Fleming Collection
Radical Perspectives
The exhibition presents the Scottish Colourist artists F. C. B. Cadell, J. D. Fergusson, Leslie Hunter and S. J. Peploe in the context of their English, Irish and Welsh contemporaries. This makes for fascinating comparisons between the painters and shows how innovative the Scots were, not least in their use of strong colour.
held at the Leciester Galleries, London, January 1925
A Century of the Scottish Colourists
My Scottish Colourists talk marks a century since the quartet first exhibited together in London. This was in an exhibition mounted at the Leicester Galleries in the English capital in January 1925. The English artist Walter Sickert wrote the catalogue introduction. He praised Peploe for his ‘skilfully related colour’, Fergusson for depicting ‘the real gleaming embossed and jewelled Scotland of legend and history’, Cadell for his ‘hardness’ and Hunter for painting to ‘inspired ends’. You can read more about it in a blog I recently wrote for the National Galleries of Scotland.
oil on millboard, 38 x 46cm, The Fleming Collection
The Ebb and Flow of Reputations
I shall be discussing the ebb and flow of the Scottish Colourists’ individual and group reputations in the years between the 1925 London exhibition and the 2025 Edinburgh exhibition. The quartet only showed together twice more whilst all four of them were alive, in Les Peintres Ecossais at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris in 1931 and in Paintings by Six Scottish Artists, along with George Telfer Bear and William Gillies, at Barbizon House in 1932. With the deaths of Hunter, Peploe and then Cadell during the 1930s, it was left to Fergusson to inspire the next generation of Scottish artists before his death in Glasgow in 1961. To find out more please join me when I give this Scottish Colourists talk on 22 April 2025.
For more on the Scottish Colourists, you might like this blog, you can read about Cadell here, about Fergusson here and learn about Hunter here.
