Still Life with Coffee Pot 1905

"Still Life with Coffee Pot" by Samuel Peploe: that’s oil paint right there, laid down in blocks and slabs of color. It's mostly cool tones—icy white, dark grays, moody blacks—except for a few rogue oranges and reds that seem to pulse with juicy life. I can just imagine Peploe, squinting at this very specific arrangement of objects, trying to figure out how to wrangle the light bouncing off that silvery coffee pot. It's almost as if he's wrestling with the still life, trying to pin it down. The way he's rendered the highlights is so direct and unfussy. Look at how the thick black paint outlines the contours of the objects, giving everything a bold graphic quality. It feels so modern, so immediate. You can almost sense the push and pull of the brush, the sheer physicality of the painting process. It reminds me of Manet, of course, or even Cezanne, all these painters trying to distill the world down to its most essential forms. Artists like Peploe are constantly talking to one another across time, riffing on the same ideas and motifs, but always with their own unique spin.