Jerwood Gallery

Anne Redpath, A.R.A., R.S.A., O.B.E. (1895-1965), Mainly Grey & White. Purchased in 1995.
Image © Royal Scottish Academy.

The daughter of a Scottish tweed designer, Anne Redpath studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1913 to 1919. Soon after graduating she married and lived in France from 1920 to 1934, painting little during these years while she raised her family. After returning to her hometown of Hawick in 1934 she became a regular exhibitor in Edinburgh, moving there in the late 1940s. She was admitted to the Royal Scottish Academy as an Associate in 1947 and was made the first woman painter Academician in 1952. In 1955 she was awarded an OBE.

As one of the so-called ‘Edinburgh School’ Redpath is particularly well-known for her still life paintings. Mainly Grey & White depicts an arrangement of household objects in subtle tones, highlighted with vivid spots of yellow. She commented, ‘I do with a spot of red or yellow in a harmony of grey, what my father did in his tweed’. Her experimentation with cool tones punctuated by bright colour possibly also originated in a visit to Florence as a student, where her simple room at a pensione on the Lugarno had a brightly coloured rug hanging on a whitewashed wall. The textured, chalky paint surface is due to the artist’s habit of degreasing her paints (draining them of poppy oil on blotting paper before applying them to the canvas). She rarely varnished her work, preferring a ‘raw’ paint surface, and like all her exhibition paintings the canvas is framed behind glass.

Having shown Mainly Grey & White at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1957, Redpath submitted the painting later that year to the first John Moores Exhibition held at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery ‘To give Merseyside the chance to see an exhibition of painting and sculpture embracing the best and most vital work being done today throughout the country’. Soon afterwards the painting entered Moores’ personal collection from which it was loaned to the Redpath Memorial Exhibition in 1965. Other important works by the artist are held by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and the Tate in London.