RSA Scottish Art

Boy Reading

Small web image of Boy Reading Artist: Samuel John Peploe
Title: Boy Reading
Year: c. 1921
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions:
Suggested topic:
Source: RSA Diploma Collection
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© the artist’s estate 
Description: Samuel John Peploe, one of the Scottish Colourists, is best known for his landscapes, flower and still life paintings that explore aspects of colour, form and composition.This painting, Boy Reading, is unusual for its restrained use of colour. The palette is composed of a limited range of greens, buff, grey and flesh tones. The colours are not bright, but tonally the painting is dominated by lightly treated areas. The chunky, angular treatment of the figure displays a painterly understanding of form. With very broad brush strokes and abrupt changes of tone and hue, Peploe has created a very three-dimensional, bold view of the figure. He has further defined the figure and other objects by the use of a thick black line, which adds weight and structure to the objects and breaks up areas of similar colours. The boy in the painting is Peploe's son, Willy, aged about eleven and wearing his Edinburgh Academy school uniform. He looks absorbed in the book, comfortably seated and with colour in his cheeks as though he has just come in from the cold after school. The mood depicted here is a quiet one. It seems as though the boy is calmly studying in a peaceful room with fading light. As a painting of a child there is something wistful about this image. The boy is not depicted playing football or exploring a forest, and neither do we see him alongside friends and family. Peploe's choice of this view of his son shows him as a studious boy, patiently getting on with school-work. It is possible that Peploe wanted to capture a moment in time as his son grew up. How would a photograph of this same scene differ from this painting? What encouraged Peploe to paint his son rather than take a photograph?