Samuel Peploe was associated with John Duncan Fergusson, a fellow Scottish painter who trained initially for a naval career before turning to art in 1894^[1]. Fergusson settled in Paris in 1907, having spent the preceding years moving between France, Spain and Morocco, and once there he quickly took up the bright colour and bold handling of Matisse and the Fauve painters he encountered around the Salon d'Automne^[1]. Fergusson later taught at the Atelier Blanche in Paris, where he influenced a wider circle of British and American painters, and he helped launch the art magazine Rhythm in 1911^[1].

The clearest evidence connecting Peploe to this milieu is Fergusson's 1905 painting Dieppe, 14 July 1905: Night, now held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, in which a figure identified as Peploe stands to the right of one of the painted groups^[1]. The picture itself was one of Fergusson's last works still showing the influence of Whistler, made before his move to Paris redirected his style toward Fauve colour. It places Peploe within Fergusson's social and artistic circle at a specific moment, but it says nothing about Peploe's own working method, his approach to still life, or the specific painting held in Adelaide.