The creation of a new language of colour in European art
Dovecot Studios, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LT
Friday 7th February – Saturday 28th June 2025
In this breakthrough exhibition, Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios, in partnership with the Fleming Collection, will for the first time place the Scottish Colourists in the context of their European and UK contemporaries, interrogating how this international generation of radical painters forged a new language of colour in Paris in the early 20th Century.
The Scottish Colourists – SJ Peploe (1871-1935), JD Fergusson (1874-1961), GL Hunter (1877- 1931) and FCB Cadell (1883-1937) – are widely recognised as Scotland’s most talented, experimental and distinctive artists of the early 20th Century.
Often exhibited as a quartet, in isolation from their contemporaries, their work will now be shown alongside Fauve painters, such as Matisse and Derain, who sparked the colour revolution, spotlighted in the exhibition by Derain’s renowned Fauvist work, Pool of London, lent by Tate.
Other major institutional loans include key works by Bloomsbury Group innovators Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, as well as major examples from Walter Sickert’s more nuanced Camden Town Group.
The exhibition will also investigate a possible ‘Celtic’ connection in the primal response to colour by Welsh artists, Augustus John and James Dickson Innes, and Ireland’s Roderick O’Conor, suggesting a continuity between the approach taken by these artists and that of the Scots.
This exciting exhibition will offer an unparalleled opportunity to challenge conventions around who, among the avant-garde pack of UK artists inspired by French innovation, should be considered the leading radical painters from 1905 to the outbreak of war in 1914.
The exhibition’s timeline will also cover the impact of Cubism and Vorticism on this group of artists immediately before and after the outbreak of war.
The culmination of the show will celebrate the coming together of the Scottish Colourists as a distinct group in the 1920s and 1930s, marked out by the continuing influence of both French colour and Scottish light upon their work as painters of landscape, still life, and interiors.
Appropriately, their dedicated group show was held in Paris in 1924, followed by a 1925 London show, making Dovecot’s 2025 exhibition a most timely centenary celebration.
James Knox, Curator of the Fleming Collection, says: “This momentous exhibition will, for the very first time, shine the spotlight on the radical Scots and their contemporaries, allowing us to truly assess their achievements and place in the history of early European modernism.
“I am immensely grateful to the national institutions and private collectors who have enabled this story to be told alongside the Fleming Collection’s outstanding Scottish Colourists.”
Celia Joicey, Director of Dovecot Studios says: “Presenting the Scottish Colourists at the vanguard of the creative avant-garde in the UK is an opportunity to recast Scotland’s pivotal role in the history of early 20th century art.
“As a tapestry studio founded in 1912, it is exciting for Dovecot to show these important paintings which set our work and world-class reputation in a compelling new context.”
The exhibition will be supported from March 2025 by a series of displays on the Dovecot Balcony Gallery of contemporary Scottish artists working with colour in creative and challenging ways in media including watercolour, acrylic, oil, wood and textile.
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