LONDON.- This summer, Sotheby’s will offer at auction one of the most exceptional collections of Scottish Colourist works in private ownership. Featuring some of the finest Colourist paintings by George Leslie Hunter, Samuel John Peploe, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell and John Duncan Fergusson, The Harrison Collection was formed in the 1920s and 1930s by Major Ion Harrison, an important patron and close friend of the artists. Comprising 31 works, the group of paintings, watercolours and drawings will be presented in a single-owner sale in London on 12 June 2018, as part of Sotheby’s Modern British Art Week. Passed down through the family, the works remained together at Croft House, Major Harrison’s home where he openly welcomed the Colourists.

Thomas Podd, Sotheby’s Scottish Art Specialist, commented: “Visiting Croft House for the first time was an experience that will live long in the memory. Crossing the threshold and walking into the elegant reception hall, one was greeted with Cadell’s masterpiece ‘The White Room’ and its harmonious tones of white and grey punctuated with flashes of dazzling colour. Through the hallway, lined with watercolours by Hunter filled with Provençal warmth, and into drawing room, one’s eye was instantly drawn to Cadell’s ‘The Drawing Room, Croft House’, hanging in the very same room it depicts, with the majority of furniture and artworks unchanged some eighty years later. It is hard to imagine a work that encapsulates so perfectly the spirit of an entire collection. With its balanced composition and sophisticated application of colour, the painting is not only the ultimate Colourist statement, but it speaks also about the collector and his friendship with the artists whose works lined the walls of his beautiful home.”

THE COLLECTOR
“To each of these fine artists I owe a debt of gratitude which can never be repaid, for it is to them…that I owe what knowledge I may have of the qualities which, collectively make a work of art.”2
Major Ion R. Harrison, a Glasgow ship owner, first encountered the work of the Colourist artists in 1921 when, encouraged by his friend Dr Thomas John Honeyman, later Director of Glasgow Art Gallery, he attended an exhibition at ‘Alex. Reid & Lefevre’ on West Street in Glasgow of paintings by Samuel John Peploe. Harrison was instantly struck by the modern and bold character of Peploe’s work and later recalled, ‘I had never seen anything in art similar to these pictures…They really startled me for, to my eyes, they were so ‘ultra-modern’. It would be three more years before Harrison purchased his first work by Peploe, swiftly followed by a number of paintings by George Leslie Hunter. Not long after Harrison purchased his first painting by Cadell, The Pink Azaleas which became a particularly cherished painting in the collection. Remembering Cadell’s first visit to Croft House, Harrison remarked that, ‘he saw…the Pink Azalea hanging on the wall in a room to his left. He went straight up to it and, sucking his pipe, looked at it silently for some time. Eventually he turned towards me and said, “I have often wondered where that picture went. I congratulate you on having acquired it and, although I say it myself, you have a damned good Cadell” .

Ion Harrison’s recollections of the Colourists are elegantly recorded in a chapter at the end of T.J. Honeyman’s Three Scottish Colourists (Edinburgh, 1950) poignantly titled As I Remember Them. It is this close personal relationship between Harrison and the artists that gives the collection such an incredible sense of immediacy. Harrison first made the acquaintance of Hunter in Glasgow in 1919 having returned from service during the Great War. Hunter became a regular visitor to Harrison’s offices in Glasgow and also to Croft House where he last stayed in 1931 just a few months before his untimely death.

Cadell was the second Colourist who Harrison met and a close friendship developed almost right away. ‘We seemed to take to each other immediately…he was a frequent visitor to Croft House - sometimes staying for two or three weeks on end. At other times…he would come into the house unannounced and spend the day quite happily.’

This close friendship between patron and artist is reflected in the correspondence they shared, preserved by the Harrison family and now gifted to the National Galleries of Scotland Archive in Edinburgh. In a letter dated from the 1st December 1929 Cadell, always commercially minded, wrote to Harrison with his opinions on the advantages of buying modern art: ‘The advantage in buying modern pictures is 1. That the buyer knows the work to be by the artist and who painted it, 2. Buying comparatively low with the sporting chance, confident with either knowledge or luck, that the picture will go up + 3. The advantage, + this to the painter, of encouraging Contemporary art without which there would be no future ‘old masters’!’3

THE COLOURISTS
The term ‘Scottish Colourists’ has now become inextricably associated with the work of Cadell, Fergusson, Peploe and Hunter, but the moniker was only coined in 1948 when three of the four were already dead. The Colourists were arguably the most avant-garde British artists of their day, and whilst they were Scottish by birth, their brightly-hued still-lifes, shimmering interiors and vibrant landscapes, are essentially French in spirit. The spark of their artistic inspiration had been found in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century – a time when the city fizzed with modernity and artistic expression. In the summer of 1924 all four Colourists exhibited their works together for the first time, in an exhibition entitled Les Peintres de l’Ecosse Moderne at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris. By this time the artists had reached their maturity but they continued to seek new subjects for their art and to be influenced and inspired by contemporary art.

The pictures in the Harrison Collection represent such a broad range of styles, subjects and dates by all of the four Colourists that they present an opportunity to assess the differing influences and themes that link them together or contrast them.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE COLLECTION
Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, The White Room , 1915, oil on canvas, Estimate £300,000-500,000
When not painting the beaches of Iona, Cadell created glamorous interiors back in Edinburgh which equally express inspiration from Impressionist art, particularly Edouard Manet. Cadell had studied for three years in Paris from the age of sixteen and it was in these formative years that French art excited, inspired and influenced his initial painting style. Refined, languid and modern, The White Room painted in 1915, was a synthesis of his study of Manet’s work, with its pared-down colour scheme of black on white punctuated with the bright accents of striking colour. The women who inhabit Cadell’s paintings of interiors are elegantly dressed in contemporary fashion and represent the ‘New Woman’ – confident, forward-looking and aspirational.

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, Reflection , 1915, oil on canvas, Estimate £400,000-600,000
In 1902 Cadell had seen James Abbot McNeil Whistler’s Symphony in White No.11 in an exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and it was a revelation to him, inspiring a whole series of pictures depicting a woman standing beside a mirror. Reflection of 1915 is a symphony in refined elegance, quiet contemplation and refracting light. A man of consummate taste, Cadell’s colour harmonies are always subtle and well balanced and in Reflection, the cool greys and whites are punctuated with bright accents of pink and blue in the porcelain, the roses on the mantelpiece and the warm tones of the woman’s flushed cheeks and red lipstick. The setting was the elegant drawing room of Cadell’s Edinburgh home at 130 George Street; the model was his muse for at least fifteen years, Miss Bertia Don Wauchope, a lady of independent means who posed because she wanted to be painted, rather than because she was paid to do so. This refinement permeated Cadell’s entire aesthetic, from the sophisticated still-lifes and interiors, to his own elegant and flamboyant dress and Edinburgh home which was decorated with beautiful objects, paintings and furniture.

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, The Pink Azaleas , oil on canvas, Estimate £250,000-350,000
Although painted almost a decade after Reflection, the influence of Whistler’s Symphony in White can also be detected in Cadell’s The Pink Azaleas of circa 1924. In the decade between, Cadell’s use of colour had become more saturated and vivid, less Impressionist and more Post-Impressionistic. These still-lifes from the mid-1920s are beautifully sophisticated and carefully arranged with every element and colour vital to the balance of the whole.

Samuel John Peploe, The North End, Iona , oil on canvas, Estimate £50,000-70,000
Back in Scotland Peploe imbibed his landscapes with the brilliant colour that he had learnt to use whilst in France and never was this more apparent that when he was on the island of Iona on the west coast near Mull. It was there that he painted a series of pictures of the white sands and turquoise and cobalt-blue sea from 1920 onwards. Peploe was invited on his first trip to Iona by his close friend Cadell, who had first discovered the island in 1912 and returned every year for summer painting vacations. The ever-changing light on the sea and the myriad of colours that this produced offered endless subjects for the two artists and the pictures painted there were as much studies in contrasting colour and tone and the rhythms and juxtapositions of shape, as the stilllifes and interiors that they painted.

Samuel John Peploe, The House in the Woods , oil on panel, Estimate £70,000-100,000
Although Paris continued to have a strong draw for Peploe and Fergusson and they made repeated visits throughout their career, they also sought new painting grounds further south. At the Atlantic coastal resort of Royan in 1910 and 1911, Peploe painted a series of brightly coloured townscapes of red roofs and malachite green foliage set against a cloudless swathe of blue sky. They were different from anything he had previously painted, using paint straight from the tube. The House in the Woods is a perfect example of this new approach to painting and was probably painted in Royan around 1911. It demonstrates the unconventional use of colour to convey the burning heat and with the cobalt blue outlines to delineate which Peploe had learnt from Matisse. The brushstrokes are emphatic, contrasting and rapid - with thick impasto swept in opposing directions to give a sense of movement through the towering pines.

Samuel John Peploe, Michaelmas Daisies and Oranges , oil on canvas, Estimate £300,000-500,000
By the mid-1920s Peploe’s paintings were at their most vibrant and his still-life subjects were stylistically similar to those of Cadell. He had always been greatly inspired by the arrangement of objects and never tired of the subject. The voluptuous contrasts of colour and form in Michaelmas Daisies and Oranges, painted circa 1925 echoes the stilllifes of Cézanne, reproductions of which Peploe kept pinned around his studio as inspiration.

Samuel John Peploe, Trees, Antibes , oil on canvas, Estimate £200,000-300,000
In the 1920s Peploe took extended painting holidays on the French Riviera, to capture the heat of the sun-baked towns and landscapes, the beautiful people who thronged the beaches and brilliance of the light reflected off the azure ocean glimpsed from the tree-lined cliffs. The most impressive landscape in the Harrison Collection is Trees, Antibes painted in 1928, an ambitious picture which owes some debt to the wind-stirred trees of Cézanne’s landscapes with their geometric pattern of branches and trunks.

John Duncan Fergusson, Paris Plage, Bathing Huts , oil on panel, 1903, Estimate £60,000-80,000
Of all the Colourists it was John Duncan Fergusson who had the most intimate and long-lasting relationship with France. It was their love of France that bonded the young Fergusson and fellow Scotsman Peploe, who probably met in 1900 in Edinburgh. The earliest picture in the selection being offered from the Harrison Collection, was painted on the beach in Normandy in 1903, Paris Plage, Bathing Huts. This small panel captures the brilliant light of a summer’s day on a popular beach where ladies are gathered at the brightly coloured huts. The influence of Monet and Renoir is evident in this work, which condenses Fergusson’s intention at that time to capture human life, sunlight, colour and movement.

John Duncan Fergusson, Paris, 1907 , oil on board, Estimate £100,000-150,000
In the four years that elapsed between painting Paris Plage, Beach Huts and Paris of 1907, the influence of the flickering, refractions of Impressionism receded to be replaced with the saturated colours and bold outlines of the Fauves.

George Leslie Hunter, The Bay, Juan - Les - Pins , oil on canvas, Estimate £150,000-250,000
There was a large and exciting community of artists spread along the Côte d’Azur, with Fergusson and Peploe in Antibes and Cassis. In the summer of 1927 Hunter enthused about the French Riviera in a letter to a patron. The heat of the Cote d’Azur warmed Hunter, whose life had not always been easy, and he was now painting with joy and verve. The Bay, Juan-les-Pins is animated with lively human activity and alive with bright colour – luscious flicks of scarlet, canary yellow and turquoise dance over the surface of the beach. The inspiration of France and French art upon the Colourists had come full circle and Hunter was experiencing the same level of excitement in the late 1920s as Fergusson and Peploe had experienced in Paris almost a quarter of a century earlier.

“As a generalisation I call Peploe the Blue Painter, Cadell the Green Painter and Hunter the Red Painter, for there are very few pictures by any of these artists which do not show a distinct fondness for their own particular colour… It became a matter of habit to talk about ‘Cadell Green’.” Major Ion R. Harrison


1 Ion R. Harrison, As I Remember Them, essay in T.J. Honeyman, Three Scottish Colourists, Edinburgh, 1950, p.119).
2 Major Ion R. Harrison, As I Remember Them, essay in T.J. Honeyman, Three Scottish Colourists, Edinburgh, 1950, p.119).
3 (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Archive (SNGMA), GMA A118/6, Letter from F.C.B. Cadell to Ion Harrison dated 1 December 1929).