Download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue - The Scottish Gallery

Blyth’s conversion was certainly complete and in 1928 for the ‘Second
Inaugural Exhibition’ organised at the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery it was
decided to devote one room of 25 pictures to Peploe. Stanley Cursiter,
in his biography of the artist, states that this was ‘in a large measure due
to the convener J.W. Blyth and another member of the committee Mr R.
Wemyss Honeyman’. The reviews of the exhibition were good, especially
for Peploe.
However, apart from two Iona landscapes and a still-life, Blyth bought very few
pictures between 1926 and 1933 because of the Depression; if business had been better
(or indeed prices at that time lower) he would undoubtedly have bought more, earlier.
The pictures collected by Blyth up to his last purchase in 1956 show Peploe’s range in
still-life, landscapes, seascapes and a few figure subjects. He had ample opportunity to
fill in gaps from the periods before he began his purchases of new work, particularly
from the dealers’ inventories after the painter’s early death in 1935. This said, he lent
pictures for The Scottish Gallery’s 1936 Peploe Memorial Exhibition and contributed
an introduction to its catalogue, and it is clear from a letter of gratitude written to him
by the painter’s widow shortly afterwards that he was already recognised as a significant
collector of Peploe’s best work long before the artist’s death. Her letter refers to a rare
visit made to see the Blyths at Wilby House, and is testament to the Peploes’ appreciation
of the support Blyth’s patronage provided.
An early picture, A Street in Comrie of 1902, purchased by Blyth during the 1920s,
is a good example of the influence of French Impressionism and Sisley in particular.
The Lobster was bought in May 1937 and is a pre-eminent example of his early style.
However, the period that dominates the works by Peploe in Blyth’s collection is the last
phase, 1920–35. Once again it is not far-fetched to see in Peploe’s mature work a musical
parallel which would have appealed to Blyth on both an intellectual and emotional level.
In March 1941, in his introduction to the catalogue for a Peploe restrospective at the
National Gallery of Scotland, Stanley Cursiter wrote:
His concentration on still-life arose from the desire to have complete
control over conditions and circumstances. He could plan the limits of his
colour scheme and devise intermediate notes; the intensity and direction
of light; the form and pattern of his group. In this way Peploe’s work
became a form of visual music in which every note of colour took its
place in a melodic scheme, to which the setting or background presented
the harmony and the design pattern stated the tempo.
Blyth did not purchase a work by one of the three other Scottish Colourists until
1939. In total he collected only 11 works by these artists including the beautiful Paris-
Plage street scene (page 71) which, though on the small-panel pochard scale, is a key work
in J.D. Fergusson’s journey into modernism.
Blyth acquired two works by English painter Philip Wilson Steer (1860–1942)
in 1934: Farm at Long Crendon and Sandy Road. Both were purchased from the Barbizon
House, run by the influential Scottish dealer David Croal Thomson in London. These
are the only two major works bought before 1939 which are not by a Scottish artist.
In his later biography of Steer, D.S. MacColl would link McTaggart to Steer as modern
successors to Constable.
During 1939 and 1940 Blyth spent a lot of time in London and certainly visited
Reid & Lefèvre, who continued to represent the Peploe estate and where Peploe’s older
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