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The Colourists

The Scottish Colourists were a group of painters from Scotland whose work was not very highly regarded when it was first exhibited in the 1920s and 1930s, but which in the late 20th Century came to have a formative influence on contemporary Scottish art.

The Scottish Colourists combined their training in France and the work of French Impressionists and Fauvists, such as Monet, Matisse and Cezanne, with the painting traditions of Scotland.

The leading figure of this movement was John Duncan Fergusson, who visited Paris regularly from the 1890s on and then lived there from 1907 until 1914. Other Scottish Colourists were Francis Cadell, Samuel Peploe and Leslie Hunter. They "absorbed and reworked the strong and vibrant colours of contemporary French painting into a distinctive Scottish idiom during the 1920s and 1930s".

The Scottish Colourists continued the work of their predecessors, the Glasgow Boys. Although their style was confident and vibrant, their subject matter was rather timid compared to their French counterparts as it merely consisted of island landscapes, Edinburgh interiors and fashionable models. The Scottish colourists were internationally known during their lifetimes but their work fell out of favor by World War II, until they were discovered in the 1980s and subsequently seen to have played an influential role on the development of Scottish art.