The Scottish Colourists

The artists, Samuel John Peploe (1871-1935); John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961); George Leslie Hunter (1877-1931) and Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937) have achieved international acclaim in recent years following major retrospective exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. Despite the diversity of their work and their relatively independent careers, they are now recognised as an identifiable movement within the history of art and their influence is still apparent in painting today. The four painters became known as the Scottish Colourists because they grafted their knowledge of contemporary French Art – Monet, Matisse, and Cezanne - onto the painterly traditions of Scotland, redefining the qualities of light and colour in their still life, landscapes, figurative paintings and drawings into their own singular styles.