Peploe was one of the Scottish Colourist painters, known for their bright colour, interest in line and form, influenced by French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Fauvist art. Other members included F. C. B. Cadell, J. D. Fergusson and Leslie Hunter. They first exhibited together as group in Paris in 1924 and the term 'The Scottish Colourists' was not coined until 1948.
Peploe was born in Edinburgh, the third son of a banker. His mother, his father's second wife, died when he was only 3, and then his father died when he was 12 or 13, leaving Peploe and his two siblings orphans. The trustees of his father's estate tried to push him into a career in law or the church, but eventually gave up and allowed him to follow his chosen profession as an artist, studying at Edinburgh School of Art, and then in Paris at the Académie Julien and Académie Colarossi, where he won a silver medal in 1894.
In 1904-7 Peploe was living in Edinburgh but making summer trips to France with Fergusson. This small-scale painting was made in the seaside resort of Berneval-le-Grand in Normandy, France, where Peploe and Fergusson went in the summer of 1904, probably staying in Dieppe where their friend the artist and art critic D. S. MacColl had a villa. It was one of a group of paintings made en plein air, that is, out of doors, and painted fairly quickly. The paintwork is rich and fluid. Here the fashionable holiday makers, chalk cliffs, beach and sea are merely suggested, rather than described. However, flashes of green, red and yellow hint at the gay outfits of the tourists. At this point It is often difficult to tell the work of Peploe and Fergusson apart. Both were under the influence of the Impressionists who depicted the middle classes at leisure by the sea, attempting to convey bright light and changing atmospheric effects; Renoir and Pissarro in particular were working at Berneval around 1900. Peploe would have seen the work of the Impressionists at the Salle Caillebotte in the Palais du Luxembourg, as well in Glasgow at the premises of the art dealer Alexander Reid. After painting in Berneval, Peploe and Fergusson moved up the coast to the artist colony of Étaples and Paris-Plage.
Credit: Purchased, 1965