.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Still life with roses, apples and coffee pot was painted in the mid-1920s when Peploe's still lifes gradually took on a more delicate palette than in the few years previously. Peploe's refined approach to his subject is demonstrated in the present work, through his use of lighting and colour and through his seemingly simple arrangement of his still life objects - the pink roses in a glass vase, a fan, apples in a bowl and the coffee pot.
The soft tones and subtle square brush-strokes produce the superbly balanced and harmonious colour which is so typical of his finest works of this period. Throughout Peploe's life he was driven by the ambition to paint the still life, not as is often wrongly believed in a decorative sense, but as an intellectual exercise, combining the analytical and scientific process of pictorial composition. In his biography, Stanley Cursiter emphasises the requirement to fully appreciate the extent to which a form of engineering is applied to the production of the still life. 'The mathematical analogy must not be overstressed, but in the building up of a pictorial design there is an element of engineering which takes account of stresses and strains set up by the relation of lines and planes, and a sense of direction which have to be balanced and counteracted in the search for equilibrium which is the pictorial ideal'.
In around 1920 Peploe began to paint on an absorbent white gesso ground and ceased to varnish his pictures, allowing the pure colour of the paint to show. Peploe's works produced in the 1920s investigated the possibilities of artistic expression in terms of pure colour and flattened pictorial space. There is no deep-rooted psychological mystery to Peploe's work: Still life with roses, apples and coffee pot portrays the simple yet stunning qualities of colour and perspective in their purest form.
By this period in his career Peploe was an established artist with his reputation affirmed by his election to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1917 and by highly successful exhibitions at Aitken Dott & Sons in Edinburgh. The present work is among one of the most dynamic and beautiful of all the artist's studies of the rose he painted during this period.
The soft tones and subtle square brush-strokes produce the superbly balanced and harmonious colour which is so typical of his finest works of this period. Throughout Peploe's life he was driven by the ambition to paint the still life, not as is often wrongly believed in a decorative sense, but as an intellectual exercise, combining the analytical and scientific process of pictorial composition. In his biography, Stanley Cursiter emphasises the requirement to fully appreciate the extent to which a form of engineering is applied to the production of the still life. 'The mathematical analogy must not be overstressed, but in the building up of a pictorial design there is an element of engineering which takes account of stresses and strains set up by the relation of lines and planes, and a sense of direction which have to be balanced and counteracted in the search for equilibrium which is the pictorial ideal'.
In around 1920 Peploe began to paint on an absorbent white gesso ground and ceased to varnish his pictures, allowing the pure colour of the paint to show. Peploe's works produced in the 1920s investigated the possibilities of artistic expression in terms of pure colour and flattened pictorial space. There is no deep-rooted psychological mystery to Peploe's work: Still life with roses, apples and coffee pot portrays the simple yet stunning qualities of colour and perspective in their purest form.
By this period in his career Peploe was an established artist with his reputation affirmed by his election to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1917 and by highly successful exhibitions at Aitken Dott & Sons in Edinburgh. The present work is among one of the most dynamic and beautiful of all the artist's studies of the rose he painted during this period.