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拍品專文
The two years Samuel J. Peploe spent living in Paris between 1910 and 1912 proved to be a revelatory experience for the artist, ushering in a period of intensive experimentation that would transform his painterly style and shape his artistic imagination for decades to come. Immersing himself in some of the most cutting edge movements of the French avant-garde of the late nineteenth - and early twentieth centuries, from the expressive brushwork of Vincent van Gogh, to the colour theories of the Fauves and the revolutionary cubist aesthetic of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Peploe turned away from the sombre still lifes which had dominated his formative years, and instead began to embrace a more colourful palette and constructed approach to form in his work.
Filled with a sonorous play of bright, saturated pigments, The Bénédictine Bottle illustrates not only the impact this French sojourn had on Peploe’s aesthetic, but also the highly experimental turn his art took during the period immediately following his return to Edinburgh. Setting up his studio at 34 Queen Street, Peploe ‘surrounded himself, with bright colours, lengths of material, flat boards distempered or painted in pure strong tints,’ according to his biographer Stanley Cursiter (S. Cursiter, Peploe: An Intimate Memoir of an Artist and of his Work, London, 1947, p. 32). Walls were white-washed and the room ‘kept as light as possible’ to facilitate his new artistic vision, while his subjects were reduced to objects which could be treated as flat, geometric forms – the rounded forms of fruit such as lemons, apples and oranges, the colourful blooms of various flowers, simple pieces of white crockery and delicate china which reappear across several compositions.
While all of the above feature in The Bénédictine Bottle, at the heart of the composition stands the distinctly shaped, dark glass bottle of the French liqueur Bénédictine, a popular tipple from the Normandy town of Fécamp. Reportedly inspired by a medicinal tonic formulated by local Benedictine monks in the 15th Century, its legendary secret formula contains an aromatic blend of twenty-seven different plants, herbs and spices, including lemon balm, hyssop, juniper, thyme, mace and Angelica. Bénédictine’s uniquely shaped bottle became a key feature in its branding and identity, occupying a central position in the firm’s advertising campaigns throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century. The design can be credited to Alexandre Le Grand, the wine merchant and wealthy industrialist responsible for developing the drink, who included a simple line drawing of his idea for the new glass container in a letter to his bottle manufacturer in 1864. It was the curvaceous profile of the bottle, its powerful sense of volume and the shifting play of light on the surface of the deeply pigmented glass, that drew Peploe’s eye.
The titular bottle sits alongside a selection of fruit, both neatly stacked, as in the compotier behind the bottle, and loosely scattered across the table top, while a single cup and saucer sits patiently in the foreground of the composition, as if waiting for its owner to return. There is an inherent solidity to each of the objects gathered on the table, a three-dimensionality that lends them an almost sculptural quality, an effect continued in the heavy folds of the tablecloth and the white napkin set in stiff peaks alongside the compotier. Applying the paint in thick layers, Peploe emphasises the multifaceted planes of each object with subtle shifts in tone and the directionality of his brushwork, which criss-crosses the canvas in bold planes of strong, diagonal strokes.
While the objects have clearly been closely observed from life, there is a certain artificiality to the scene. There is no natural logic to the arrangement of objects on the table – they have not been discarded at the end of a meal, nor captured in a fleeting moment, before they are used by unseen parties. Instead, they have been deliberately arranged by the artist for the purpose of painting alone, drawn together for the visual intrigue they exhibit when considered together. Indeed, according to his niece, Peploe would obsessively arrange and rearrange his still lifes before committing his composition to canvas, often pouring over a grouping for several days at a time, subtly adjusting and repositioning the objects as he explored the myriad of possible configurations that lay within. It was this aspect of the still-life, its apparently endless visual possibilities, which led Peploe to write in 1929: ‘There is so much in mere objects, flowers, jugs, what not – colours, forms, relation – I can never see mystery coming to an end…’ (S.J. Peploe, quoted in ibid, p. 73).
Filled with a sonorous play of bright, saturated pigments, The Bénédictine Bottle illustrates not only the impact this French sojourn had on Peploe’s aesthetic, but also the highly experimental turn his art took during the period immediately following his return to Edinburgh. Setting up his studio at 34 Queen Street, Peploe ‘surrounded himself, with bright colours, lengths of material, flat boards distempered or painted in pure strong tints,’ according to his biographer Stanley Cursiter (S. Cursiter, Peploe: An Intimate Memoir of an Artist and of his Work, London, 1947, p. 32). Walls were white-washed and the room ‘kept as light as possible’ to facilitate his new artistic vision, while his subjects were reduced to objects which could be treated as flat, geometric forms – the rounded forms of fruit such as lemons, apples and oranges, the colourful blooms of various flowers, simple pieces of white crockery and delicate china which reappear across several compositions.
While all of the above feature in The Bénédictine Bottle, at the heart of the composition stands the distinctly shaped, dark glass bottle of the French liqueur Bénédictine, a popular tipple from the Normandy town of Fécamp. Reportedly inspired by a medicinal tonic formulated by local Benedictine monks in the 15th Century, its legendary secret formula contains an aromatic blend of twenty-seven different plants, herbs and spices, including lemon balm, hyssop, juniper, thyme, mace and Angelica. Bénédictine’s uniquely shaped bottle became a key feature in its branding and identity, occupying a central position in the firm’s advertising campaigns throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century. The design can be credited to Alexandre Le Grand, the wine merchant and wealthy industrialist responsible for developing the drink, who included a simple line drawing of his idea for the new glass container in a letter to his bottle manufacturer in 1864. It was the curvaceous profile of the bottle, its powerful sense of volume and the shifting play of light on the surface of the deeply pigmented glass, that drew Peploe’s eye.
The titular bottle sits alongside a selection of fruit, both neatly stacked, as in the compotier behind the bottle, and loosely scattered across the table top, while a single cup and saucer sits patiently in the foreground of the composition, as if waiting for its owner to return. There is an inherent solidity to each of the objects gathered on the table, a three-dimensionality that lends them an almost sculptural quality, an effect continued in the heavy folds of the tablecloth and the white napkin set in stiff peaks alongside the compotier. Applying the paint in thick layers, Peploe emphasises the multifaceted planes of each object with subtle shifts in tone and the directionality of his brushwork, which criss-crosses the canvas in bold planes of strong, diagonal strokes.
While the objects have clearly been closely observed from life, there is a certain artificiality to the scene. There is no natural logic to the arrangement of objects on the table – they have not been discarded at the end of a meal, nor captured in a fleeting moment, before they are used by unseen parties. Instead, they have been deliberately arranged by the artist for the purpose of painting alone, drawn together for the visual intrigue they exhibit when considered together. Indeed, according to his niece, Peploe would obsessively arrange and rearrange his still lifes before committing his composition to canvas, often pouring over a grouping for several days at a time, subtly adjusting and repositioning the objects as he explored the myriad of possible configurations that lay within. It was this aspect of the still-life, its apparently endless visual possibilities, which led Peploe to write in 1929: ‘There is so much in mere objects, flowers, jugs, what not – colours, forms, relation – I can never see mystery coming to an end…’ (S.J. Peploe, quoted in ibid, p. 73).