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Lot Essay
'...sometimes I just simply see the picture without having anything actually in front of me. I see it as a completed picture and that means that half the picture is done for me. I see it in colour and in shape' (Anne Repath talking in a BBC film about her paintings, 1961).
Painted circa 1947 Summer Gaiety is a beautiful example of Redpath's mature style, with expressive brushwork and a harmonious explosion of vibrant colours. Still life painting was particularly important to Redpath in the late 1940s and 1950s and almost half of her exhibits at this time were images of flowers in pots, vases and jugs or potted plants on table-tops with various objets d'art from her own collection. Terence Mullaly, the Daily Telegraph critic, on describing Anne Redpath's house, wrote: 'Colour and exuberance abounded: from the pottery cat to the putto supporting a table, it was gay and bright. I found it hard to know which was the more fascinating room - her studio or her kitchen. The one, its floor splattered with paint, had scattered about it, among the unfinished pictures, those props that recurred in her paintings. It was a veritable kaleidoscope of colour. But so, too, was the kitchen, a room at once joyous and utilitarian'.
Redpath's technique had long involved an 'all over' approach which disregarded perspective and instead concentrated on colour contrast and form. She was clearly influenced by Matisse, for whom colour and form were key, and his influence on her style is clear from her works in the first half of the 1940s. Redpath also saw a connection between her father's career as a tweed designer and her own use of colour. 'I do with a spot of red or yellow in a harmony of grey, what my father did in his tweed', and this is visible in the simple cloth on which the vase of flowers sit. Derek Clarke, a contemporary of Redpath's in the Hanover Street Group who met from 1947 until 1950, recalls Redpath's 'liveliness and concentration, walking back and forth, turning suddenly to spring a surprise on the image and catch it unawares, screwing up her eyes to diffuse the focus and generalise the image. She was at every stage concerned with the whole of the painting rather than concentrating on a small area'. This focus on the even treatment of the surface which was a prime concern of the abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock in America during the 1940s and 1950s is powerfully conveyed in Summer Gaiety. The vase full of flowers on the table appears to be viewed from a slightly elevated perspective. The table top, however, appears flattened as if it has been painted with a bird's eye view. Redpath cited the Italian Primitives as having a great influence on her work of this period and Summer Gaiety provides an interesting example of the extent to which their work informed her understanding of perspective. She would also have been familiar with Chagall's work from her time in France, furthermore they met in 1956, and it is possible to see an affinity with his floral still lifes, in both the perspective and the saturated use of colour she employed.
Painted circa 1947 Summer Gaiety is a beautiful example of Redpath's mature style, with expressive brushwork and a harmonious explosion of vibrant colours. Still life painting was particularly important to Redpath in the late 1940s and 1950s and almost half of her exhibits at this time were images of flowers in pots, vases and jugs or potted plants on table-tops with various objets d'art from her own collection. Terence Mullaly, the Daily Telegraph critic, on describing Anne Redpath's house, wrote: 'Colour and exuberance abounded: from the pottery cat to the putto supporting a table, it was gay and bright. I found it hard to know which was the more fascinating room - her studio or her kitchen. The one, its floor splattered with paint, had scattered about it, among the unfinished pictures, those props that recurred in her paintings. It was a veritable kaleidoscope of colour. But so, too, was the kitchen, a room at once joyous and utilitarian'.
Redpath's technique had long involved an 'all over' approach which disregarded perspective and instead concentrated on colour contrast and form. She was clearly influenced by Matisse, for whom colour and form were key, and his influence on her style is clear from her works in the first half of the 1940s. Redpath also saw a connection between her father's career as a tweed designer and her own use of colour. 'I do with a spot of red or yellow in a harmony of grey, what my father did in his tweed', and this is visible in the simple cloth on which the vase of flowers sit. Derek Clarke, a contemporary of Redpath's in the Hanover Street Group who met from 1947 until 1950, recalls Redpath's 'liveliness and concentration, walking back and forth, turning suddenly to spring a surprise on the image and catch it unawares, screwing up her eyes to diffuse the focus and generalise the image. She was at every stage concerned with the whole of the painting rather than concentrating on a small area'. This focus on the even treatment of the surface which was a prime concern of the abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock in America during the 1940s and 1950s is powerfully conveyed in Summer Gaiety. The vase full of flowers on the table appears to be viewed from a slightly elevated perspective. The table top, however, appears flattened as if it has been painted with a bird's eye view. Redpath cited the Italian Primitives as having a great influence on her work of this period and Summer Gaiety provides an interesting example of the extent to which their work informed her understanding of perspective. She would also have been familiar with Chagall's work from her time in France, furthermore they met in 1956, and it is possible to see an affinity with his floral still lifes, in both the perspective and the saturated use of colour she employed.