Fleming Collection opens with true colour and light

Samuel John Peploe, Roses, 1919. Image © The Fleming Collection

The four artists known as the Scottish Colourists, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, John Duncan Fergusson, George Leslie Hunter and Samuel John Peploe, were one of the most talented, experimental and distinctive groups in 20th century British art.

The lives, relationships and accomplishments of these pioneering artists are set to be explored in Colour and Light: Scottish Colourists from the Fleming Collection, a new exhibition at opening at Sheffield’s Graves Gallery this summer.

The exhibition will present over 30 paintings, sculpture and works on paper from the Fleming Collection.

Highlights include Samuel John Peploe’s Luxembourg Gardens, c.1910.

Margaret Morris, Flossie Jolley, c. 1915. © By kind permission of Margaret Morris Movement International Limited.

His move to France in 1910 marked a turning point. Over the previous five years, his annual visits had brought him into contact with the artists known as the Fauves, including Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlamink, and with the emerging giant of Modern Art, Vincent van Gogh. Their influence, particularly their vivid use of colour and bold brushwork, unlocked the reserved Scot’s wild side, inspiring his use of primary colours, often applied directly from the tube. Luxembourg Gardens reveals his surrender to the raw expressionism of the Fauves and to the vivid palette and technical accomplishment of Van Gogh.

John Duncan Fergusson, Eástre, Hymn to the Sun, 1924, (edition of 10 cast by The Fine Art Society 1990).

Fergusson had been drawn to sculpture from the early 1900s after viewing the Benin bronzes in Edinburgh.

His 1924 sculpture, Eástre depicts the Saxon goddess of spring and was inspired by Fergusson’s partner, Margaret Morris, who choreographed a ballet of the same title.

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, The Dunara Castle at Iona, c. 1929. Image © The Fleming Collection

His golden brass orb, composed of spheres and hemispheres, was, he wrote: the ‘effect of the sun [and its] triumph…after the gloom of winter.’

George Leslie Hunter, Peonies in a Chinese Vase, 1925.

In the early 1920s Hunter pushed the boundaries of still life painting in a relentless examination of the balance between colour, line and form.

The decorative elements of Peonies in a Chinese Vase reveal the influence of Henri Matisse, who championed decorative arrangement in his art.

When art critic Clive Bell, a great enthusiast of Post-Impressionism, saw this painting in London, he wrote: ‘This is the finest picture in this exhibition and I do not know who painted it’.

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, The Dunara Castle at Iona, c. 1929.

With the encouragement of Peploe, Cadell abandoned his pre-war style in favour of colour, which was used to brilliant effect on his annual painting trips to Iona. Priming his canvasses with an absorbent white mix, known as gesso, he captured the intense colours from the light refracted off the sea. In order not to weaken the luminous effect, each painting came with an instruction on the back in his elegant hand: ‘Absorbent ground. NEVER varnish.’

Colour and Light: Scottish Colourists from the Fleming Collection opens at the Graves Gallery on Saturday 14 July and continues until 9 December 2023 – entry to the gallery is free.