Still Life: Paint Tubes
Still life composition of artist's tools and equipment arranged on a table placed in front of a white wall. The composition includes a sketch book, glass container, brush, palette and three paint tubes. Painted in muted tones using broad a fluid brushwork.
This is not a conventional subject for a still life and is certainly far removed from Peploe's repetitive use of small number of familiar props - tulips and roses, oranges and apples, oriental vases, fans and coloured drapes - so typical for his well-established later work. In this early still life we are given a unique opportunity to dip into the backstage of the artist's making process and to quickly explore the equipment and tools he uses. There are a few paint tubes lying on the table in the foreground. Today the most basic part of the artist's inventory, collapsible tin tube that could be sealed with a screw cap was a revolutionary invention that forever changed the quality of painting. Patented by John Goffe Rand in 1841, the paint tube gave artists access to ready-made paints that no longer had to be laboriously produced in studio and now could be easily transported and used for plein-air painting - a great advantage employed particularly by French Impressionists, who in the second half of the 19th century could easily pack their entire "studio" in a backpack and paint a quick impression directly from nature anywhere they wanted. The possibility to re-seal the tube also helped to keep the pigments fresh for longer periods of time, and also to store newly invented vibrant hues of reds, greens or yellows. Renoir once said that 'without paints in tubes, there would be no Impressionism'.
French artists of the late 19th and early 20th century including Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were a huge inspiration for Peploe to gradually develop harmonious plays of vibrant colours on his own canvases. Still Life: Paint Tubes is one of Peploe's earlier works painted in more muted tones following the inspiration from Dutch Masters and their focus on the play of light on the simplest of the household objects. Peploe's brushwork here is very broad and fluid, perhaps the result of him diluting the paint from tubes with turpentine oil in the glass bottle also included in this composition.
Credit: Purchased, 1965