Peploe is one of the great names of Scottish painting. The success of his career was founded on assiduous technical study in Edinburgh and Paris and a wide but profound appreciation of past masters from Frans Hals (he also spent time as a student in Holland) to Edouard Manet. This however was allied to intelligent curiosity about up to the minute developments in avant garde painting in Paris where he spent many of his first years as a professional artist before the first world war.

Encouragement for this international approach came from the experiences of The Glasgow Boys, many of whom were only a decade older than Peploe. Not only had they studied on the continent but they then exhibited abroad, in America as well as in Europe, a path that Peploe and his fellow colourists were to follow. This broader approach meant that both schools initially kept up with the rapid cultural developments of their time. However, what elevates Peploe above the Scottish artists of the previous generation is that, unlike the majority of The Glasgow Boys, he did not settle back into complacent repetition after the initial flourish of modernity as a young man. His work never stopped changing and developing.

In his 1924 introduction to the catalogue for the Colourist exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, Walter Sickert, one of the greatest and most intelligent British painters of 20th century, wrote of Peploe’s early work that it had ‘carried on a certain kind of delicious skill to a pitch of virtuosity’.