Anne Redpath Fifty Anne Redpath Fifty
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ANNE REDPATH FIFTY I FIFTY A cElEbrAtory ExHibition 3 July to 1 August 2015 16 Dundas Street · Edinburgh EH3 6HZ Telephone +44 (0) 131 558 1200 Email [email protected] www.scottish-gallery.co.uk II It is fifty years since the death of Anne Redpath at what FOREWORD seems today like the young age of sixty-nine. In her late-flowering success on the stage of the art-world she became enormously admired, even revered, amongst her peers and a wide circle of friends. L.S. Lowry sought her out and took tea in her elegant flat in London Street; Reid & Lefevre, that most patrician of London galleries, held her exhibitions in the south (always the occasion for a new hat) and in Edinburgh a younger generation of painters (often friends of her painter sons) flocked to her home and studio for good conversation in an atmos- phere where art mattered. Redpath was kind and generous with her fellow artists not just from professional courtesy but from a genuine warmth and sympathy. She had achieved much but all of it was hard won and well earned. She sent work to all the Scottish exhibiting bodies as well as the Royal West of England Academy and Royal Academy summer show but most importantly she showed with The Scottish Gallery enjoying close relationships with Mrs Proudfoot and then Bill Macaulay exhibiting in 1950, 1953, 1957, 1960, 1963 and fittingly in a memorial show in 1965. She was included in all the major survey and group exhibi- tions of Scottish art and by the time of her death had an international reputation. Today that reputation is intact, although much else manages to shout louder, sometimes drowning out the quieter voices. Like the previous generation of colourists her practice embraced belle peinture and her subject was chiefly still life and landscape. There is also present an elegance or even restraint which perhaps derived from her love of the quattrocento. At the same time we can appreciate her enjoyment of her materials evident in her vigorous mark making with brush, knife and rags so evident in her oil painting. These qualities might never have been be reconciled in the hands of a lesser painter but endure in her work ensuring her artistic legacy is still vibrant fifty years since her passing. guy PEPLOE Opposite: Invitation cards from previous Anne Redpath exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery. C Anne Redpath’s death fifty years ago in an Edinburgh BLUE SKY ON nursing home at the age of sixty-nine was a shock to her family, friends, fellow artists and the wider public. When I was researching my biography of her almost a quarter A GREY DAY of a century later there was still a sense of loss felt by the people I interviewed. Although she had been unwell for PATRICK BOURNE the last decade of her life her work was still developing and she had earlier that year had an exhibition of Venetian subjects at Lefevre in London that had sold out by the second day. So it was felt that it was a career as well as a life cut short. And yet with the perspective that half a century gives, Redpath’s career as an artist now seems remarkably full and complete. From the time of her return from France with her young family in 1932, when she committed to full-time painting, her stylistic and technical development was relentless. There was a constant quest for a fresh vocabulary to describe new subject matter. She avoided that bane of the history of painting in Scotland, and admit- tedly of other Schools, of artists sitting back when they have developed a successful style and popular format. Her intellectual curiosity was never satisfied and she was always open to the ideas of other, often younger, artists – the Action Painting of Jackson Pollock and the Tachisme of Antoni Tapies were strong influences in her final years. Both artists had rejected subject for complete abstraction which Redpath never did. She used the subject matter of her painting as a departure point, often abstracted but always anchored by the seen object. Redpath was quite sure that her artistic sensitivity came from her father who was an innovative designer of tweed in the Border town of Hawick. However her ambition to go to art school was only acceded to by her parents if she also took a teacher training course. Riskily she decided to attend the two courses concurrently in Edinburgh. The level of her aptitude and determination can be gauged by her being the sole recipient of a travel- ling scholarship in 1919 from Edinburgh College of Art whilst also successfully completing the teaching course at Moray House. She made full use of her scholarship, visiting Brussels, Detail from Wild Flowers on a Bank, c.1962 [cat.29] Bruges and Paris before moving on to Italy where she D E Omer in Northern France where her husband was an to the island with her son David, his future wife Eileen and consistently attracted her was church architecture, architect for the War Graves Commission. It was close to Anne’s friend Katie Horsman the potter. usually the interiors. She herself was not a church-goer what had been the Western Front only three years before Paintings from her month-long stay on Skye formed the but she enjoyed the exoticism and richness of Baroque and the landscape as well as the local people would still core of Redpath’s first solo show in Scotland at the Gordon ornament in the churches of Catholic countries on the have shown the scars. When they moved to Cap d’Ail on Small gallery on Princes Street in March 1947. The pictures Mediterranean. They constituted a sharp contrast to her the French Riviera in 1925 it must have been an uplifting sold well and this enabled her to plan a trip abroad for the strict Presbyterian upbringing in the Borders. Her father’s experience for the whole family. Anne produced enough first time since her return from France in 1934. She trav- obituary in the local newspaper The Hawick Express paintings to stage an exhibition in nearby St Raphael elled alone to Paris and then on to Menton on the Italian records rather tellingly that ‘logic was more native to him in 1928. The work was mainly in watercolour and has border, twenty miles from where she once lived. Street in than feeling’; his daughter spent much of her life acting affinities both in handling and in the subject matter Menton [cat.8] is a product of this trip and it gives a palpa- out the opposite. There were also practical reasons for of harbours and buildings with what Charles Rennie ble sense of the artist’s familiarity with, and affinity for the painting the interiors of churches. Firstly they were cool, Mackintosh was producing nearby in Port-Vendres. It place. When Redpath returned to Scotland her sketches whereas outside Redpath was troubled by the heat as she is tantalising to imagine they met although there is no and studies of Menton were used to create the large oil got older, but also when she painted in the street she was record of it. Window in Menton (Fleming-Wyfold Collection) with the constantly disturbed by inquisitive children and it was not When Jim’s job as the in-house architect to an figure of her daughter-in-law Eileen in the foreground. This in her nature to ignore them. American businessman came to an end in 1934, Anne painting is her chef-d’oeuvre of the late 1940s just as Red It is fitting that this celebratory exhibition is at The and the boys returned to the Borders and Jim moved to Slippers is of the beginning of that decade. Scottish Gallery with which she had such a happy and the south of England. Although contact was maintained The artistic stimulus that came from her stay in fruitful working relationship following her first exhibition until Jim’s death in 1959 they never again lived together Menton encouraged her to make many more European there in 1950. And it was through this association that as a family. Anne now needed to provide for her family trips in the following years, firstly to Spain and then to and from this point on she devoted herself to painting. Brittany, Portugal, Corsica, The Canary Islands and finally Much of her work at the outset was of Border villages to Amsterdam and then Venice. Each new landscape and such as Wilton Dean and Trow Mill and she painted trees culture that Redpath encountered changed and informed in farmland (cat. 4 & 5) which have a new vigour and not only the landscapes and architectural subjects she dynamism giving a sense of renewed purpose. But the produced but also everything she painted thereafter Anne Redpath, c.1913 Border landscape did not satisfy her for long. Through including her still lifes. In Corsica in 1954 and in Gran the rest of 1930s and into the 1940s Redpath produced a Canaria in 1959 she experienced harsh sun-bleached encountered her main influences. Tellingly her copy of series of ever more ambitious and sophisticated still lifes hillsides where in the resulting paintings the houses the angel in Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat in the and domestic interiors that culminated in The Indian Rug appear as though they grow out of the hills giving them Uffizi [cat.1] is less of a copy than her own interpretation (or Red Slippers) of 1942 (sngMA, Edinburgh).