'More Sun, More Colour' -- The Scots Come to Woking

There's something very un-Scottish about the Scottish Colourists. So vibrant, so exuberant, so full of sun. Four artists who, in the first few decades of the 20th century, infused their art with a French spirit, the feel of the Mediterranean, Fauvist and Cubist influences.

There are a lot of paintings by JD Fergusson, SJ Peploe, FCB Cadell and GL Hunter in Scottish galleries, but the Tate's website musters only five works between them. So Burning Bright: The Scottish Colourists at the Lightbox in Woking offers those of us in south-east England the rare chance to appreciate these groundbreaking British modernists.

The Colourists weren't a movement in the sense that they worked and exhibited together; indeed, the description Scottish Colourists wasn't coined until after World War II, by which time three of them were already dead. But they were friends, their careers followed similar courses and they absorbed the same European influences, having all gone to France before World War I. Paris wasn't enough: In 1913, Fergusson decided he had to go south, to the Mediterranean, for "more sun, more colour".

Fergusson is probably the best-known of the four artists, and in some ways his pictures are the most flamboyant. Rhythm, from 1911, takes a prominent position on one of the end walls in this show. It's a monumental and voluptuous image, full of rounded, solid, highly-coloured forms.

Fergusson was strongly influenced by ballet, and Rhythm calls to mind one of his best-known pictures, the naked sylvan dancers of Les eus, in the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.

But much of the Colourists' work is rather smaller in scale, with the still life a favourite theme. Fergusson's The Blue Lamp again demonstrates his preference for strong outlines and bold colours.

Peploe shows different influences. Souvenir from 1905, with its objects on a mantelpiece, has the feeling, perhaps, of an Edouard Vuillard, though a slightly more solid one, while a Still Life from around 1913 has a Cubist aspect to it; a jug and a bowl of fruit are painted with jagged edges, but that's as far as the Cubism goes -- they remain undeconstructed, still clearly viewed from only one perspective.

More exciting is the vivid colouring and patterns of these tulips that seem to dance across the entire surface of this painting from around 1919, apparently the wildest and most untamable of cut flowers.

But it was Cadell whose work seems to have taken the most interesting, the most experimental track. The Blue Fan from 1922 is made up of flat areas of vivid acid colours. There's no depth, no shadow, making it very two-dimensional. It's a really very attractive picture, with a sort of proto-Patrick Caulfield feel to it.

Cadell also liked to use a picture-within-a-picture device, as in this painting, The Green Bottle, also from the 1920s but with a rather more solid look to it. The fruit in the bowl on the table in the foreground is echoed by the fruit in the picture on the wall in the background, and the bold horizontals and verticals break the image into contrasting sections.

We haven't mentioned the fourth of the quartet yet, and that's because we found Hunter's painting, which was very much more rooted in old-master traditions, a bit on the dull side.

Then we saw this one from afar:

Where is it, we wondered? The Canal du Midi? Somewhere closer to Paris? No, it's Balloch, at the southern end of Loch Lomond. Peploe thought that a series of paintings Hunter did on this theme were as good as Henri Matisse. Well, maybe not, but he had us fooled.

Cadell's impressive work also took in landscape and portraiture. A plein-air picture of Ben More in Mull in the Inner Hebrides is full of atmosphere, in blues and pinks that have to be seen on the canvas for full effect. Equally eye-catching is the sensitive portrait of a Negro in White, possibly Leith-based boxer Mannie Abrew, who posed for Cadell several times. The sitter's skin tone is dramatically accentuated by the brightness of his vest.

Cadell's penchant for blocks of colour and pictures-within-pictures was carried over to his portraits. This striking Portrait of a Lady in Black depicts his muse, the Edinburgh socialite Bertha Hamilton Don-Wauchope.

This is one of a wall of impressive portraits by Cadell and Fergusson. Both seem to have had a bit of a hat obsession, using the headgear to focus the attention on the face -- Fergusson with a particularly elaborate Blue Hat, Closerie des Lilas, Cadell with a very Impressionist view of his muse in a Black Hat in front of a mirror. 

No hat in this final work by Fergusson, which seems to be full of the spirit of the 1920s. The sitter is likely to have been a pupil at the summer dance schools run by his wife, Margaret Morris, captured in the palm-shaded garden of the Villa Gotte, a seaside property in the south of France that belonged to her patron.  

We really enjoyed this show; there's plenty of explanatory material about the four artists and their work, and it's mostly made up of pictures from Scottish collections that aren't readily accessible to those of us in the South-East. It's the second good exhibition we've seen at the Lightbox this year, so we can recommend the short trip out from London to a venue that deserves to be better known.

Practicalities

Burning Bright: The Scottish Colourists can be seen at The Lightbox in Woking until January 12. It's open Tuesday to Saturday 1030-1700, with lates on the last Thursday of the month to 2030, and on Sundays from 1100 to 1600. A day pass to the gallery's exhibitions costs £7.50. The Lightbox, on the banks of the Basingstoke Canal, is a five-minute walk from Woking station, which has frequent trains from London Waterloo taking about 25 minutes.

Images

JD Fergusson, Rhythm, 1911, Courtesy of University of Stirling Art Collection
JD Fergusson, The Blue Lamp, 1912, City Art Centre, City of Edinburgh Museums & Galleries. Courtesy of Perth Museum

SJ Peploe, Tulips -- The Blue Jug, c. 1919. Courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
FCB Cadell, The Blue Fan, c. 1922, Courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
FCB Cadell, The Green Bottle, c. 1920s, Courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
GL Hunter, Reflections, Balloch, c 1929-30, Courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
FCB Cadell, Portrait of a Lady in Black, c. 1921, Courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

JD Fergusson, Villa Gotte Garden, c. 1920, City Art Centre, City of Edinburgh Museums & Galleries