* ANNE REDPATH OBE RSA ARA (SCOTTISH 1895 - 1965),
STILL LIFE WITH FLOWERS FRUITS AND VEGETABLES
watercolour on paper, signed
image size 39cm x 54cm, overall size 65.5cm x 78.5cm
Mounted, framed and under glass.
Note: Anne was born in Galashiels, the daughter of a tweed designer (she later described how she used flecks of colour in a manner similar to tweed makers: ‘I do with a spot of red or yellow in a harmony of grey, what my father did in his tweed’). In 1913 she studied at Edinburgh College of Art and in 1920 she married James Beattie Michie, an architect with the War Graves Commission in France, where they lived for the next fourteen years. During this time she did little painting, devoting herself to her family (she had three sons). In 1934 she returned to Scotland, living first in Hawick and then from 1949 in Edinburgh (she became gradually estranged from her husband, who worked in London). From the 1950s she attained a distinguished position in the Scottish art world and was awarded various honours. Her main subjects were landscapes and still-lifes, richly coloured and broadly handled in the tradition of the Scottish Colourists (in her later work there is sometimes a hint of Expressionism). She travelled a good deal, painting landscapes in, for example, Spain and Portugal. Redpath retains a position as one of the most highly regarded Scottish artists of the twentieth century and UK public collections hold one hundred and sixteen examples of her work.