Scottish artist creates Château Mouton Rothschild 2020 label

Peter Doig has been revealed as the artist of the 2020 label for Château Mouton Rothschild, a Scottish artist who lives between London and Trinidad. This is the first British artist since Lucien Freud in 2006, and before that (then) Prince Charles in 2004 and Francis Bacon in 1990.

The painting is a dreamscape, celebrating the growing and harvesting of grapes, showing workers in the vineyard. Peter Doig wished to establish a connection with artists like Millet, van Gogh and Bacon who had depicted vineyard or farm workers. The work also had a personal inspiration in his Trinidadian friend, an artist known as Embah (Emheyo Bhabba) who brought a cuatro – a four string guitar – to one of Doig’s exhibitions in Paris and shared his music and poetry during the course of the evening.

“The painting shows something of what goes on behind the scenes in the production of wine, what happens offstage, as it were”, says Doig. “It’s a sort of ode to workers, to all those involved at the various stages of making a wine before it’s finally bottled. It’s a dream with a romantic streak, as if someone spontaneously decided to sing in the vines. It’s a moment of poetry, where you can take your time. It’s neither really day nor really night, but rather something in between, between waking and sleeping. It is possible to see it as a progression, a dream journey in the world of the harvest.”

Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Peter Doig grew up in Trinidad and Canada before moving to London to study at St Martin’s School of Art and Chelsea School of Art. Since 2002, he has lived between London and Trinidad. Doig has been the subject of several major museum exhibitions worldwide including surveys at Tate Britain in 2008, the National Gallery of Scotland in 2013, Fondation Beyeler 2015 and the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo in 2020. He taught for a number of years, notably at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, where he held a professorship from 2004 to 2017, and served as a Trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1995 to 2000.

“We wanted an artist who uses canvas and pictorial material to express figurative subjects,’ said Julien Beaumarchais de Rothschild. ‘Unrivalled as a colourist, Peter Doig focuses entirely on painting and has become one of his generation’s foremost exponents of the discipline, holding exhibitions all over the world. There is something very special about his technique and his universe that sets them apart in contemporary figurative art. His subjects are very varied, his painting resists any classification: he has succeeded in creating his own, inimitable world.”

All the artworks can be seen in the Paintings for the Labels exhibition, created by Baroness Philippine de Rothschild in 1981 and on permanent display at Château Mouton Rothschild since 2013.

This is the latest in a decades-long relationship between the Rothschild family and the art world. For the launch of the 2019 vintage, I interviewed Sarah Kemp for a podcast on the history of the Mouton labels, please have a listen here as she takes us through many amazing stories behind the labels, from Baroness Philippine getting on a small plane to Mexico to track director (and artist) John Huston down while he was filming Under the Volcano – something that resulted in the 1982 label, to how she later accompanied Francis Bacon while buying socks in Harrods to convince him to take on the 1990 label.

You can also scroll through a collection of the previous labels here.