Anne Redpath's Double-Painting

By Brynn Gordon

Anne Redpath was a celebrated Scottish modern artist born in the Borders at Galashiels in 1895 and passing away in Edinburgh in 1965. Redpath was known as a painter of landscapes and still lifes and for her ability to present insights into the wider world through understated representations of her surroundings; by examining her double-sided work of The Indian Rug (c.1942) and Borders Landscape (c.1942), we can gain a deeper understanding of the dual mediums she practised in and how she utilised each to communicate different aspects of her life.

 In the early 1900s, she attended the Edinburgh College of Art but gave up her professional practice after marrying James Beattie Michie, an architect for the War Graves Commission, and moved to France in 1920. During these years, Redpath spent her time caring for her children and doing small, personal sketches and paintings. While not actively practising, Redpath may have used this time to gather inspiration – observing the popular continental style of graphic lines and simple forms advocated by the likes of Matisse and Vuillard. This formal approach may also have led her to reflect on her early influences of applied arts in her father’s tweed design studio – his treatment of colour and texture, as well as the texture and quality of fabric, later became fundamental to the development of works like The Indian Rug and Borders Landscape. Redpath’s family eventually returned to Scotland as the German threat to France grew, moving to Hawick town whilst her sons enlisted in the conflict.

Anne Redpath The Indian Rug (or Red Slippers) c.1942. Oil on plywood. 73.90 x 96.10 cm Royal Scottish Academy.

This is the setting in which Redpath’s double painting was created: removed from the inspiring and vibrant art world of continental Europe, at the centre of a global conflict, and likely with more free time than she had possessed in the past 14 years raising her family. From balancing the sense of anxiety with the opportunity to expand her artistic horizons, The Indian Rug emerged, its flat treatment of depth and askew, intersecting angles of the walls, chair and rug giving the otherwise peaceful an off-kilter appearance. The domestic subject may have emerged out of the war’s travel restrictions, preventing Redpath from engaging in her usual practice of observing far-flung and unusual landscapes, attested to by the subjects of her other works, towns in Corsica, kiosks in France, and churches in Venice and Lisbon, forcing her to depict the outside world in absentia.

Her domestic space and life became a microcosm – the Indian rug, its vine pattern spreading and creeping across the floor, is a reminder of the freedom her family once enjoyed; its jagged edges make it appear almost as a scrap torn from the outside world or from Redpath's past, snuck into the composition for safekeeping (and may also show her father’s influence in Redpath’s appreciation for textiles).

The empty chair and ineffectual, unfilled shoes also convey a sense of emptiness and loss. Pointing outward as if someone had been there moments before, the contrast between the purposeful and practical objects in the still life – the chair, shoes, and book – and their arbitrary and ungrounded appearance creates an atmosphere of listlessness. One gets the sense that the house, emptied of children due to a global conflict and soon to witness the estrangement of Redpath and Michie, became a setting for these still lives, simultaneously revealing the unstable nature of the outside world and the shift from wife and mother to independent artist that Redpath herself underwent.

Anne Redpath, Borders Landscape, c. 1942. Oil on plywood. 73.90 x 96.10 cm Royal Scottish Academy.

The Indian Rug contrasts Redpath’s scene on the reverse of the plywood canvas, a vision of her border town of Hawick, where she moved in the 1930s after returning from France. Borders Landscape is considered by critics an inferior work to the psychological and contextual depth communicated by The Indian Rug. The painting shares many of the same greens, purples, and whites Redpath utilised in her other work, but instead of the cold, moody tones of a Scottish domestic interior, they communicate a lightness and hopefulness, almost evoking the raking light of a sunset.

Ben Nicholson, 1945 (St Ives), 1945. Oil, pencil and gouache on board, 29.2 x 46.7 cm, Offer Waterman Gallery

While skilfully portraying a picturesque and pleasant town by the water, this scene does more to position Redpath within her domestic art scene in its resemblance of British Modern styles exemplified in the work of Ben Nicholson at his wartime retreat in St Ives. In their overlapping forms, geometric compositions and use of simple colours, both may present a pleasant vision of escape from the difficulties of war. While Redpath identified as a “contemporary, but not modern” painter, perhaps because of her long hiatus and focus on her immediate surroundings rather than grand ideas of “modernism”, Borders Landscape effectively grounds her work in the context of British and Scottish modernist style and scene.

When viewing these pieces together, one might consider Borders Landscape as the happy and pleasant exterior and mentally zoom in to the window of one of the houses in which you might stumble upon the undercurrent of personal and historical frustration of The Indian Rug. How many other personal vignettes play out in this beautiful setting? How many Borders Landscape windows might reveal the same? While Redpath’s dual paintings are not considered equal, when taken together they provide an intuitive vision into not only her personal life but also her artistic range and references. If one were to only look at one artwork to understand “Who is Anne Redpath,” this work would be a strong contender.

Bibliography

 Artuk.org. “Redpath, Anne, 1895–1965 | Art UK,” 2015. https://artuk.org/discover/artists/redpath-anne-18951965.

National Galleries of Scotland. “Artworks | National Galleries of Scotland,” 2018. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/search?artists.

National Galleries of Scotland. “Borders Landscape by Anne Redpath | National Galleries of Scotland,” 2023. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/260376?page=1493&search_set_offset=89597.

nationalgalleries. “In Focus | the Indian Rug (or Red Slippers) by Anne Redpath.” YouTube, September 18, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVu65xM0C6k.