Anne Redpath 1895-1965
Summer Flowers, c1945
oil on board
19 by 24 inches




The experimentation with cool harmonies of white in this sparkling flower-study is very characteristic of Anne Redpath's work in the mid-1940s and may have originated in her experiences in Italy when she travelled there as a student just after the First World War. Her memories of her room at a pensione in Florence could almost stand as a description of this evocative rendering of summer flowers "....the walls were a rough, white plaster. There was a gay, orange and red rug hung on a wall. There were cool white tiles on the floor.....coming in from the heat of Florence in the summer to this cool room with shutters keeping out the heat and the lovely bit of colour which had far more intensity because it was against white". And another equally significant early memory came out of her father's profession as a tweed designer in the colour flecking known and used by tweed makers for scumbling: "I do with a spot of red or yellow in a harmony of grey what my father did in his tweed" she once observed.
Painted while she was still lviing in her white-walled house in Hawick, this is a comparatively early example of Redpath's mature style in a career that had been slow to develop because of family responsibilities. She was, by this point however, already exhibiting regularly with all the main Scottish Institutions, being elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1947, and was also showing regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Now, as one of the most admired of Scottish 20th Century artists, her work can be seen as coming out of that fine tradition of Scottish Colourist painting that included such artists as Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter and Peploe. To which she was to add her own particular and distinctive experience as a woman - wife, mother, as well as painter: "I put everything I had into house and furniture and dresses and food and people. All that's the same sort of thing as painting really and the experiences went back when I started painting again".