ANTES DEL ALZHEIMER :: Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Anne Redpath (British artist) 1895 - 1965
Summer House in a Lisbon Garden, s.d.
oil on board
61.5 x 51 cm. (24.21 x 20.07 in.)
signed 'Anne Redpath' (lower right)
private collection

Redpath's father was a tweed designer in the Scottish Borders. She saw a connection between his use of colour and her own. "I do with a spot of red or yellow in a harmony of grey, what my father did in his tweed." The Redpaths moved from Galashiels to Hawick when Anne was about six. After Hawick High School, she went to Edinburgh College of Art in 1913. Post-graduate study led to a scholarship which allowed her to travel on the Continent in 1919, visiting Bruges, Paris, Florence and Siena.
The following year, 1920, she married James Michie, an architect, and they went to live in Pas-de-Calais where her first two sons were born; the eldest of whom is the painter and sculptor Alastair Michie. In 1924, they moved to the South of France, and in 1928, had a third son: now David Michie the artist.
In 1934, she returned to Hawick. Redpath was soon exhibiting in Edinburgh, and was president of the Scottish Society of Women Artists from 1944 to 1947. The Royal Scottish Academy admitted her as an associate in 1947, and in 1952, she became the first woman Academician. In 1955, she was made an OBE for her work as "Artist" and "Member of the Board of Management of the Edinburgh College of Art".
With her children grown up, and an active involvement in Edinburgh art circles, she moved to live in town at the end of the 1940s. In the 1950s and early 1960s, she also travelled in Europe, painting in Spain, the Canary Islands, Corsica, Brittany, Venice and elsewhere.

Redpath is probably best known for her still lifes where familiar household objects - a chair, a cup - are made into a "two-dimensional" design. She used textiles - a printed tablecloth, a spotted scarf - to add pattern within the pattern. The Indian Rug, also known as Red Shoes, is a good example of this group of paintings. Matisse's influence is clear in these bold, flat-surfaced interior arrangements. Critics see another influence in the tabletops tilted to suit the design, not conventional perspective: that of the medieval Sienese paintings which impressed her on her first trip abroad. At this time she first discovered the richness of Catholic imagery (unfamiliar to a young woman brought up as a Scottish Protestant), a theme explored in her later work.