The painter Clotilde Brewster Peploe was born in 1915, the daughter of Cristopher Brewster, an American born in Austria, and Elizabeth von Hildebrand, also a painter born in Florence, and the fifth daughter of the German sculptor Adolph von Hildebrand.
During the 1930's Cloclo and her mother spent long months painting together in southern Italy, and later in Corfu and on mainland Greece. At the same time she became romantically attached to Willy Peploe, son of the Scottish artist, S.J Peploe, whom she married in Athens in November 1939.
As the world war closed in around them, the Peploes were ordered to Cyprus, and later to Kenya, where Cloclo gave birth to their first two children.
The family returned to a semi-destroyed Florence at the end of 1946, where their third child was born, before moving to London in 1948, where Willy began working as an art dealer - and subsequently became director of the Lefevre Gallery.It was not until the mid fifties that Cloclo, slowly but determinedly, was able to resume her pattern of work, which required extended periods of solitary, almost monastic existence in what were often very remote Mediterranean locations - Ponza, Crete, the Cyclades or Calabria.
Throughout these years Cloclo remained strangely reluctant to exhibit or part with her work except to very close friends - though she was finally persuaded to do so on three occasions in London at the New Grafton Gallery in 1973, 1978, and 1982.
She died where she was born, in Florence in 1997.