Paris-Plage was painted during one of the friends’ stays on the Côte d’Opale between 1904 and 1907. Basing themselves in the nearby artists’ colony of Étaples, they worked along the coast including at Paris-Plage (now known as Le Touquet) and Berck. As Fergusson recalled ‘we worked all day, drawing and painting everything. And we thoroughly enjoyed the food and wine.’ (quoted in Margaret Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson: A Biased Biography, Glasgow 1974 (2010 edition), p.45).
Extant photographs show the pair on the beach at Paris-Plage, dressed in three-piece suits and with their ‘pochade boxes’ on the sand beside them. These were portable kits for painting outdoors, in which small panels – like the one on which Paris-Plage is painted - as well as a palette, brushes, tubes of oil paint and so on, could be stored. The glorious immediacy of the brushstrokes in Paris-Plage reveals the freedom and excitement of painting on this very spot. Using generous amounts of oil paint, applied at speed and with confidence, Peploe conveyed promenading figures in the foreground, the eye-catching bathing boxes in the mid-ground and the distinctive beachfront architecture in the background. The brilliant blue sky which crowns the composition provides the sunshine which illuminates the scene, which is realised in a palette composed of tones of white and blue, enlivened by highlights of red. It is a celebratory visualisation of a stylish summer resort and a bravura example of en plein air painting.
Paris-Plage formerly belonged to Peploe’s friend, the Edinburgh printer and publisher A. Ernest Harley. They studied together in Paris in the 1890s (see Guy Peploe, S. J. Peploe, Farnham, 2012, p.93) and Harley not only collected Peploe’s work but also promoted it in the early days of his career. The present painting may be one to which Peploe referred in a letter to his wife, Margaret Mackay, of April 1911:
Harley came over to see my things tonight and collared three small ones for which he paid £12 – every little helps. He also took away four others which he thinks he can sell to a man he knows. He is going to show a lot of my old, small pochades in his office and send out invitations; he says he can sell some … Harley said in his office today: “I believe you are a genius”, I said there was not the least doubt about it!.
(quoted in Guy Peploe, op.cit., p.82).
Such was Harley’s seriousness about collecting art that, also in 1911, he wrote Old Pictures: How to Collect Them, which was published by Otto Schulze & Co. of Edinburgh. His wife went on to lend Paris-Plage to two key exhibitions of Peploe’s work, staged at the National Gallery of Scotland in 1941 and organised by the artist’s son, Denis Peploe with the Scottish Committee of the Arts Council, in 1953.
