Offer Waterman, London, where purchased by the present owner in 2003

Edinburgh, Aitken Dott & Son, Anne Redpath, October 1950, no.19

The present work represents a significant moment in Anne Redpath's career. In October 1950 the prominent Edinburgh dealers Aitken Dott & Son held a large solo exhibition of Redpath's work which proved to be a huge success. By the early 1940s, it is generally agreed that Redpath’s work had reached the standard of its early promise during her time as a student at the Edinburgh College of Art and the period surrounding the 1950 exhibition is widely regarded as the artists's most successful.

Still Life with Fruit is typical Redpath's work of this period. During the 1940s she experimented with muted palettes, spatial rendering and harmonious colours. The palette is largely comprised of subtle pink tones and highlights of white and these lighter shades, much like the composition itself, are balanced by the more colourful fruit bowl placed in the lower left. The steeply angled perspective of Still Life with Fruit, in which the viewer looks down upon Redpath’s sculptural arrangement of objects, reveals the diverse influences behind her work. These included Persian and Indian painting, as well as Japanese woodcuts: examples of which the artist’s son David🐻 recalls embellishing his mother’s studio.

Of Redpath’s contemporaries in the Edinburgh School, her greatest influences were William MacTaggart and William Crozier, but the objects which frequent Redpath’s still lifes will also be familiar to admirers of the earlier generation of Scottish Colourists. Particularly influential was the work of F.C.B. Cadell. The Colourists, themselves pioneers of still life, tended toward brighter palettes and more traditional perspective, but maintained an overall balance which Redpath’s work also achieves. In a testament to her unwavering attention to detail in this regard, Derek Clarke wrote of Redpath that ‘she was at every stage concerned with the whole of the painting rather than concentrating on a small area’ (Patrick Bourne, Anne Redpath 1895-1965: Her Life and Work, Edinburgh, 1989, p.32).