They were never a group. They did not exhibit together as a foursome until the 1920s, they never called themselves Colourists, and the name that made them famous was applied retrospectively, in print, after most of them were dead.
What they had in common was a decision. Between roughly 1900 and 1914, four Scottish painters went to France, looked hard at what was happening there, and came home refusing to darken their palettes again.
The four
S. J. Peploe (1871–1935) was the oldest and the most disciplined. An Edinburgh solicitor's son who trained at the Trustees Academy and then in Paris, he spent his life on a small number of subjects — a jug, some roses, a table edge, the shore at Iona — and rearranged them for hours before laying down a stroke. The apparent looseness of a finished Peploe is what is left after the composition has been settled to the millimetre.
J. D. Fergusson (1874–1961) went furthest into the French avant-garde, lived in Paris, edited Rhythm with Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, and later became the intellectual centre of the Glasgow art scene. He is also the reason this collection has three names in it rather than four: Fergusson died in 1961, so his work remains in copyright in the UK until the end of 2031. We will not sell prints of it, and neither should anyone else without a licence.
F. C. B. Cadell (1883–1937) was the stylist. Sent to study in Paris at sixteen, he painted flat planes and hard edges with a confidence that reads as effortless and was not. He served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the Great War, enlisting as a private, and the work afterwards is cooler and sharper than the work before.
G. L. Hunter (1877–1931) had the strangest route of the four. Born in Rothesay on Bute, taken to California as a boy, largely self-taught, he was preparing his first solo exhibition in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the entire body of work. He came back to Scotland and started again.
What they actually changed
Scottish painting in 1900 was tonal. You built a picture out of light and dark, modelled the form in gradations of brown, and colour was something you added at the end to identify objects.
The Colourists inverted it. Colour became the structure. A Peploe still life is held together by the relationship between a black outline, a white cloth and a wedge of red — not by modelling. Cadell paints an interior as a set of flat rectangles. Hunter loads a harbour scene with pure pigment and lets the drawing look after itself.
None of this was new in Paris. All of it was new in Edinburgh, and it took a long time to be forgiven.
Iona
Cadell first painted on Iona around 1912. Peploe joined him from 1920, and between them they went out most summers for the rest of their working lives.
The colour in those pictures is the thing people refuse to believe. The beaches on the north end of Iona are shell sand, almost white, and in strong light the water over them goes turquoise and jade in bands you could pick out with a pantone book. Cadell painted it flat and undiluted because that is genuinely what it does. Softening it would have been the lie.
Between them they made a two-mile Hebridean island into a permanent subject in Scottish art, and the island still looks like their pictures.
Where the name came from
Nobody in the group used it. “The Scottish Colourists” was fixed by writers and dealers after the fact, principally through the advocacy of T. J. Honeyman, the Glasgow doctor turned dealer who later ran Kelvingrove and wrote the book that grouped Peploe, Cadell and Hunter together. Fergusson was folded in afterwards.
Hunter painted Honeyman's portrait, which is a neat closing of the circle: the man who named them sat for one of them.
What to hang
If you want one picture that explains the whole argument, take a Peploe still life — roses in a Chinese vase, or pears and a wineglass — and look at how little modelling there is and how much the picture depends on three or four colour decisions.
If you want the one that will actually change a room, take Cadell's Iona. Nothing else in Scottish painting is that colour.
See the Scottish Colourists collection — archival prints, framed or unframed, made to order and shipped free worldwide.