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Lot Essay
The paint is thickly worked in Cassis, Looking Inland - every brushstroke loaded with pigment, its weight drawn across the surface of the canvas. Each gesture becomes filled with intent, as Peploe translates the small French port town into a rhapsody of colour and tone. Peploe was one of the four Scottish Colourists, who introduced the principles of Post-Impressionism to Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Peploe had been working in a studio in Paris before deciding to follow in the footsteps of André Derain, Georges Braque, and Paul Signac, and to visit the fishing resort of Cassis, east of Marseille. Peploe travelled there with his son and was joined by his close friend and fellow Colourist J.D. Fergusson. It was Peploe’s first trip to the Mediterranean and he would repeat it many times.
He painted the port and its small boats, but he was drawn to the landscape around Cassis, with its dry orange earth and sun-hardened trees. In Cassis, Looking Inland, he surveys the roofs of the town, jumbled on top of each other, and up towards the hills in the distance. In the bright, crystalline light, edges and contours take on a sharper form, while colours become thicker, more material. The houses have salmon pink and creamy walls, with unexpected dashes of lemon. By flattening the picture’s surface, Peploe reveals the influence of Paul Cézanne and his landscape paintings around l’Estaque. Yet there is also a trace of the Fauves in the bold outlines to delineate the trees and the buildings, Peploe pinning down the scene before him. The hillside in the background, with the trees cutting through the valley, is captured by bold daubs of green, blue, and pink pigment, the paint scraped and smudged to capture the haze, the light filtered through the dust and heat rising up from the earth.
Peploe’s stay at Cassis was highly productive and he had a solo show at the Baillie Gallery in London in March 1914, where half of the works came from his excursion to southern France. Coming on the heels of the landmark Manet and the Post-Impressionists show curated by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries in 1910, it showed how the Post-Impressionists’ innovative use of colour and form was now shaping British artists in ways that were impossible to ignore. Cassis, Looking Inland belongs to the pivotal cultural moment just before the First World War when artists across mediums were challenging how the world could be represented.
He painted the port and its small boats, but he was drawn to the landscape around Cassis, with its dry orange earth and sun-hardened trees. In Cassis, Looking Inland, he surveys the roofs of the town, jumbled on top of each other, and up towards the hills in the distance. In the bright, crystalline light, edges and contours take on a sharper form, while colours become thicker, more material. The houses have salmon pink and creamy walls, with unexpected dashes of lemon. By flattening the picture’s surface, Peploe reveals the influence of Paul Cézanne and his landscape paintings around l’Estaque. Yet there is also a trace of the Fauves in the bold outlines to delineate the trees and the buildings, Peploe pinning down the scene before him. The hillside in the background, with the trees cutting through the valley, is captured by bold daubs of green, blue, and pink pigment, the paint scraped and smudged to capture the haze, the light filtered through the dust and heat rising up from the earth.
Peploe’s stay at Cassis was highly productive and he had a solo show at the Baillie Gallery in London in March 1914, where half of the works came from his excursion to southern France. Coming on the heels of the landmark Manet and the Post-Impressionists show curated by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries in 1910, it showed how the Post-Impressionists’ innovative use of colour and form was now shaping British artists in ways that were impossible to ignore. Cassis, Looking Inland belongs to the pivotal cultural moment just before the First World War when artists across mediums were challenging how the world could be represented.