From his earliest youth, Samuel Peploe felt an affinity with French art and culture and, after a brief period of study at the Royal Scottish Academy, he moved to Paris in 1894 and furthered his tuition at the Académies
Julian and Colarossi. Peploe’s art subsequently developed into two main streams, both indebted to the legacy of French Impressionism: a passion for still life, drawn from his study of Édouard Manet in particular,
and an equal obsession with painting high-keyed landscapes, worked-up out of doors in the classic Impressionist manner. Peploe’s earliest still lifes were imbued with the spirit of Manet’s flower paintings of the
early 1880s, and paid homage both to Manet’s luscious handling of the oil medium and to the painterly bravura of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Frans Hals. Reproductions after both artists constantly adorned
the walls of his studio.
Around 1900 Peploe moved into a spacious but dark studio in Devon Place, Edinburgh. Here he crafted jewel-like still-life arrangements highlighted dramatically against dark backgrounds. These are highly personal
exercises revealing Peploe’s love of manipulating paint, where joyously swirled pigments achieve a painterly symphony that relegates the subject of the composition to a somewhat secondary place. Still life, c. 1904,
is a classic example of this phase of Peploe’s painting career. At the end of 1905 Peploe moved premises again, this time to a large, well-lit room in York Place, Edinburgh. In what is now known as his ‘white’ period,
his palette shifted slightly at this time and took on a lighter and creamier tonality; his still-life paintings also occasionally incorporated a white cloth.
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