The Gourds by Anne Redpath (1895-1965) depicts a still life with three gourds in white, orange, and yellow against a white cloth and a black background. The black is captured in dryer, wide and active strokes of watercolour, in contrast with the wetter grouping of watercolour in more vibrant shades of colour in the gourds and cloth. Redpath used light washes of water colour in the gourds first, then added a more pigmented layer of paint to build up the shadows and overall shape, with these steps seen primarily in the white and orange gourds. The brightness of the subject contrasts with the background, drawing the eye directly to the gourds on the cloth. 

Redpath's earlier work is characterised by these still lifes, often focusing on fruit or flowers. Her well known use of vibrant colour is present in this work through how she works in contrasts, with the bright orange, yellow, and white gourds against the black background heightens their vibrancy further. The active use of brush strokes in this work also characterises Redpath's shift in her work during the late 1950s towards Abstract Expressionism, with a freer handling of paint.

Anne Redpath OBE RSA ARA ARWS, 1895-1965

Born in Galashiels, the daughter of a tweed designer, Anne Redpath overcame initial parental opposition to the study of art on condition that she also trained as a teacher. In 1913 she enrolled at Edinburgh College of Aer, where she was taught by, among others, David Alison, Henry Lintott and D.M. Sutherland. The college awarded her a travelling scholarship in 1919, and Redpath went to Brussels, Bruges, Paris, Florence - where she lived for several months - and Siena, where she was impressed greatly by the work of the Sienese Primitives, particularly the brothers Lorenzetti.

In 1920 she married James Beattie Michie, an architect with the war Graves Commission in France, spending fourteen years bringing up a family, first in northern France and then on the Riviera, painting whenever she could. She and her three sons returned to Scotland in 1934, living in Hawick, where she had been brought up. She moved to Edinburgh in 1949. On her return to Scotland she took up painting again in earnest, forced to earn a living from it. Until she travelled in Spain in 1951 her paintings were mainly still lifes and landscapes, but after that visit her art developed a new strength and drama, her handling of paint was much freer, and her work developed a more abstract quality.

Colour and texture fascinated Redpath. The influence of her father's work remained with her, as she observed in later life in an exhibition catalogue: "I do, with a spot of red or yellow in harmony with grey, what my father did with his tweed." In the last twelve years of her life she painted in Corsica, the Canary Islands, Portugal, Amsterdam and Venice. Serious illness in 1955 and 1959 seemed only to intensify the emotion with which she charged her canvas.

Redpath painted highly decorative works in which simple colour harmonies dominate. revealing the influence of the French post-Impressionist, in particular Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard and Vuillard.