A Blaze Of Northern Lights

The Scottish Colourists are enjoying a rare outing in the north and south of England. Mary Miers visits a pair of shows that dispel the winter gloom

WHEN, in 1963, the newly established Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, Cumbria, staged a survey of 20th-century Scottish artists—including recently acquired works by Joan Eardley, Elizabeth Blackadder, Ian McKenzie Smith, Anne Redpath and Alistair Park—it acknowledged their debt to the Scottish Colourists and borrowed some paintings by this older generation to include in the show. The Colourists had enjoyed success and international recognition during their lifetimes, but interest in their work had waned and the curator, Helen Kapp, took a lead in drawing attention to their contribution to British Modernism.

It would take several decades for the significance of this group of four to be widely re-evaluated, after which their popularity has continued to grow; in 2011, Peploe’s Still Life with Coffee Pot (1905) smashed auction records for a Scottish painting when it sold at Christie’s for nearly £1 million.

Outside Scotland, holdings of the Scottish Colourists remain minimal, however, and their paintings are seldom on public view. So it comes as a welcome opportunity to be able to visit two exhibitions in England devoted to the development and impact of their work.

At the Lightbox in Woking, Michael Regan, working with Guy Peploe of the Scottish Gallery, has curated a comprehensive introduction to the oeuvre of this mould-breaking quartet— Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935), John Duncan Fergusson (1874– 1961), George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) and Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883–1937).