The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives, Edinburgh review: 'fizzing with energy'

The thick blanket of Victorian respectability did not entirely suffocate British art. The Pre-Raphaelites pioneered painting the prismatic colours of daylight. In Scotland this inspired William McTaggart who taught Arthur Melville. In France, Melville then absorbed the lessons of Impressionism and became one of the finest artists of the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile a vain, cantankerous, but brilliant American artist, James McNeill Whistler, set the cat among the fat and overpaid pigeons of English art.

McTaggart is not in the exhibition The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives, but Whistler’s Crepuscule and Melville’s dazzling Orange Market provide magnificent, metaphorical gateposts to the show. Drawn from the Fleming Collection and a wide range of loans, it marks the centenary of the first exhibition in the UK of the four Scottish Colourists, SJ Peploe, JD Fergusson, FCB Cadell and Leslie Hunter as a group. Their first group show was in Paris the year before. The aim here is to bring them together with the English, Welsh and Irish artists who, like them, responded to the upheaval in French art that the English critic, Roger Fry, christened Post-Impressionism with exhibitions in London in 1910 and 1912. The first included artists like Van Gogh and Gauguin and the second Picasso, Matisse and their contemporaries. Both outraged the English public.

The picture that greets you as you enter the present show is Peploe’s Interior with a Japanese Print. The preamble that follows includes the Whistler and Melville pictures, Fergusson’s lovely portrait of Jean Maconochie from c.1902, and Peploe’s brilliant Lady in a White Dress. Also here are works by Lavery and his fellow Irishman, Roderick O’Connor. (There is another picture by O'Connor later in the show.) The Welsh contingent consists of a lovely small painting by Augustus John and a mystical landscape by James Dickson Innes. Also included here are works by three Scottish artists of great promise who died young, Bessie McNicol, Robert Brough and William Yule.

French art is present mostly by proxy, reflected in the work of the British artists, but André Derain’s The Pool of London from 1906 demonstrates just how radical it was. With its brilliant colour and bold and simple handling, the picture is a showstopper. As curator James Knox points out, however, by painting the same view of London as Monet had done, but in a radically different way, before Roger Fry could think of it, this is pointedly post-Impressionist.

Fry included British artists in his second show, but they were mostly his Bloomsbury chums. He also included himself, but not the Scots. The Scots however organised a defiant, counter-show calling themselves the Rhythmists – Rhythm was the title of their magazine. As well as Fergusson, Peploe and others this show included Anne Estelle Rice and Jessica Dissmor, both represented here by small works of quality.

Fergusson was art editor of Rhythm and his copy of the magazine is here alongside work mostly painted in Paris by him and by Peploe. The bold drawing, broad brushwork and rich colour of Fegusson’s Self-Portrait painted in 1907 shows he was already up to speed with Derain and the Fauves. He is also standing in the spotless, white-painted studio that his visitors described. Its austerity evidently represented his determination to do something new in art and in his self-portrait he is already moving onward and out of the picture. One of the most striking images here, however, is his Blue Nude in the savagely simplified style that gave the Fauves their name, “Wild Beasts”. Peploe’s small painting of the Luxembourg Gardens shows similar freedom and energy while his Still-life with a Bottle is distinctly Cubist. His small figurative Design is even more radical however. Also included here is Fergusson’s magnificent painting, The Blue Hat, Closerie des Lilas – he loved women’s dramatic hats. When Peploe painted his wife, her hat is not so dramatic, but its shadow on her face certainly is. Just a bright green stripe, it’s a direct homage to Matisse’s The Green Stripe that helped earn the Fauves their name.

There is some very good contemporary English painting here and Harold Gilman’s beautifully coloured Canal Bridge and Charles Ginner’s Road Sweeper are both clearly inspired by Van Gogh. Neither artist, however, has been able to realise the fizzing energy that is so striking in the work by Peploe and Fergusson confronting them here across the floor.

Cadell’s career only took off around 1910, Hunter’s even later. The former is introduced here with one of the lovely pictures that he painted of Venice in 1910. They were quickly followed by such dazzlingly stylish pictures as The Feathered Hat and a lovely cool still-life of carnations. Cadell was gay and two of the most striking pictures by him here are male nudes, one possibly of Jack Abrew, a black sailor, and the other of William Thomson, a boxer known as Basher Willie.

Still-lifes by Hunter, like Peonies in Chinese Vase, or the superb Still-life with a White Jug, both with echoes of Dutch painting were among his most successful earlier works. After the war he painted in Fife for a while. A painting of Lower Largo records that time. He then went to France and an ink and watercolour picture of Villefranche shows how close he came to Raoul Dufy and Matisse. Back in Scotland he lived by Loch Lomond, seen here in a tranquil late painting.

The paintings that Cadell and Peploe did on Iona are among the loveliest pictures by any artist in this generation. In its freshness and simplicity, Cadell’s Ben More and Mull is a beautiful example. So too is his Dunara Castle (the ferry) at Iona. Peploe’s Green Sea, Iona, is as beautiful, but Peploe also had a strong sense of pictorial architecture. Here it captures the grandeur of the landscape, but it is seen as powerfully in a still-life from c.1928. A still-life with teapot by Duncan Grant looks a bit wobbly beside Peploe. A vase of flowers by Vanessa Bell looks even weaker beside a very strong still-life by Margaret Morris, but an earlier still-life by Grant shows a better grasp of cubism than two rather more literal essays in the new style.

There is much else in the show which will repay several visits, but its self-styled finale presents grand examples of the mature work of these four artists, among them, Peploe’s great painting of Kirkcudbright, a sunlit painting of Casis by Cadell, Hunter's Loch Lomond and a tranquil painting of Dinard by Fergusson. But for me at least, although it is not in this finale, the show ends with Fergusson’s The Drift Posts, a Highland landscape from the 1920s. In it he brings the new vision to this clichéd landscape to see it in a wholly fresh light. It was an opening to the future.

Until 28 June