Details

Object type

painting

Title

The White Girl

Artist/Maker

Samuel John Peploe artist

Culture/School

Scottish Colourists

Place Associated

Britain, Scotland, Edinburgh (place made)

Date

1918-1919

Materials

oil on canvas

Dimensions

framed: 752 mm x 540 mm x 68 mm; unframed: 610 mm x 407 mm

Description

A girl, dressed in the costume of a Pierrot, or sad clown, from the Italian Comedia dell’arte, sits on a bed. Her pose is pensive and protective and the shadows create an air of foreboding and unease. It is an almost monochromatic work, painted in varying shades of white. Brightly coloured landscapes and still lifes were more typical of Peploe’s output at the time, so this figure study is somewhat unusual.

There was a so-called ‘White Period’ in Peploe’s work following a move to a new Edinburgh studio in 1905; 32 York Place had been built in 1795 for the Scottish Enlightenment painter Henry Raeburn. It was a light and airy studio, with large windows and elegant Georgian details. He decorated it a pale pinkish grey, furnishing it with a few select pieces of furniture, including a white Regency-style sofa on which he posed his model, the elegant Peggy MacRae. Peploe experimented with subtle tonal variations on the colour white, using a fluid, creamy paint. However, the style and mood of our painting, painted more than 10 years later, is quite different. It is much drier in paintwork and broken in texture, with shorter brushstrokes. It is not a painting of Edwardian elegance but has deeper, darker overtones. This is altogether a more complex painting, showing greater depth and maturity of technique and intention.

The painting looks back to D. G. Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850), his controversial Annunciation scene which shows the Virgin as a frightened, vulnerable young girl on a bed. Rossetti claimed it was the first of all the white girls ‘that have since become so numerous’. In this statement he was referring to the American artist James McNeill Whistler’s provocative series of White Girls, which were cutting-edge aesthetic statements about the nature of painting, painted in the 1860s, which drew attention to colour, formal arrangement and compositional harmony and balance over subject matter. J. D. Fergusson recalled that in their youthful days Whistler, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater and art for art’s sake theory filled their conversation. Peploe’s painting situates itself within this white girl historical debate.

Pierrot clowns were ubiquitous in French and British culture in the 19th-century and early 20th-century, in literature, art, theatre, cabaret and costume balls. They were associated with melancholy, often playing with ideas of vice and virtue, sexuality and gender. Pierrot appears in the paintings of Picasso, whom we know that Peploe admired, as well those of Cézanne, Derain, Ensor, Chagall, Klee, among many others. In fact Pierrot became something of a symbol or alter-ego for the modernist artist - sensitive, melancholy, solitary.

The date of this painting is significant. In 1918 Peploe was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy, something he felt quite conflicted about and which caused him to question his artistic identity. Wartime itself was a period of reflection and self-examination for Peploe. In 1914 Peploe volunteered for service but failed his medical, which left him depressed and unable to work. His second son Denis was born in March 1914, so there must also have been financial anxiety. However, the Glasgow dealer Alexander Reid stepped in to try to help, offering him an annual income of £200 in return for paintings. Peploe refused, as he didn’t want to be under any obligation but he was deeply grateful for Reid’s belief in him, which helped him return to work with renewed focus. Reid continued to promote Peploe’s work.

This painting was purchased by William Burrell from Reid on 28 April 1919. It was one of seven Peploe paintings that Burrell bought between 1919 and 1926. It is a painting that perhaps reflects on the loss and hardship experienced in WW1, as well as on women and sexuality at a time of tremendous more

Credit Line/Donor

Gifted by Sir William and Lady Burrell to the City of Glasgow, 1944

Collection

Burrell Collection: Pictures [Oils, Pastels and Watercolours]

ID Number

35.587

Location

Burrell Collection