In a letter to F. C. B. Cadell of 1916, Samuel Peploe expressed his search for a new artistic challenge: ‘I am finished with the colour block system and await a new development.’ The present work is a direct reflection of these new explorations. Disqualified from military service on medical grounds, in 1915 Peploe accepted the invitation of his artist-friends Ernest Archibald Taylor and Jessie M. King to paint at Kirkcudbright, where the couple had settled in 1914. The Dumfries paintings of 1915 and 1916, including the present example, are the first sustained body of new work that would evolve his artistic practice in the years to follow.

The view is taken from the south bank of the harbour, looking across the still water of the river Dee at low tide towards the rear of the High Street. In the upper left, the broken vertical fingers of MacLellan’s Castle, a roofless tower-house of 1582 long stripped of its lead and slates, stand against a pearl and rose-flushed sky. On the water’s edge stand two white-rendered fisherman’s gables and to their right, taller two-storey townhouses back onto the river along Castle Street. Each building is reduced to its planar essentials, and are boldly reflected in water that serves as a near mirror.

The painting is markedly different from his series of works painted in France before the First World War. Here we have an angular approach to the landscape with strong outlines that contrast with the fluid brushstrokes and soft tonal colours of his works pre-1910, in which the influence of Manet and Whistler is still prevalent. Now we begin to see the impact of Cézanne and the Fauves, a result of his trip to Cassis on the Côte d’Azur in 1913, and which would propel the direction of his celebrated still-lifes. These began in 1917, the year after the present work, when Peploe took up a new studio in Edinburgh and embarked on his quest for the perfect still-life. Kirkcudbright thus stands as an important transitional work, in which the geometric composition points to the bold forms and colour palettes of the still-lifes to come.

The painting was sold by Aitken Dott & Son, Peploe’s dealer who gave him his first one-man show in Edinburgh in 1903. It then passed into the ownership of Mrs Winifred H. Hyslop of Tweed House, Melrose, who gifted it to her nephew, the journalist and broadcaster Alastair Hetherington (1919–1999). Hetherington had retired from the editorship of The Guardian in 1975 after nineteen highly respected years and subsequently served as Controller of BBC Scotland. Kirkcudbright was subsequently bought at auction where it has remained in a family collection since 2000.

The series of works made in Kirkcudbright demonstrate Peploe’s wartime years as the pivot on which the whole later Colourist achievement turns: the moment at which the lessons of France were put to the test in a Galloway harbour and survived the test transformed.