JOHN DUNCAN FERGUSSON R.B.A. (SCOTTISH 1874-1961) §
GOAT, 1921 (CAST 1991)
£3,780
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 112- 206 | Thursday 05 June from 6pm
Description
Bronze, numbered 10/10
Dimensions
10.5cm x 7.5cm x 5.5cm (4in x 3in x 2in)
Provenance
Acquired from the J. D. Fergusson Art Foundation in 1991 and thence by descent to the present owner
Footnote
John Duncan Fergusson is the only one of the four artists known as the Scottish Colourists – along with F. C. B. Cadell, Leslie Hunter and S. J. Peploe – to have worked in three dimensions. Indeed, he made sculpture over some 50 years, with his first created in Paris in 1908 and the last thought to date from about 1955. The importance of this aspect of Fergusson’s practice is clear in the inclusion of sculptures in many of his exhibitions between 1912 and 1948.
Goat comes from Fergusson’s most productive period of sculpture-making, the years approximately 1918 to 1922, when he was based in London. It was inspired by a distinctive breed of goat owned by the businessman George Davison, who was a major patron to Fergusson and his partner, the dance pioneer Margaret Morris. Morris’s Summer School of 1919 was held at Davison’s home, Wern Fawr, in Harlech, north Wales and she recalled:
‘For Fergus, the outstanding feature of the…Summer School at Harlech was the goats that G. D. [sic] had recently acquired. They were mountain goats, used to living and breeding among rocky crags…They jumped from rock to rock completely sure-footed. What fascinated Fergus [sic] was the way their hair grew…it was long but stood out in frills round their legs like trousers. Fergus made endless drawings of them but said they must be done as sculpture, so when back in London he got a lump of plasticine and…carved it into a goat he called Trousers and got it cast in brass. Later he had it enlarged for exhibition.’ (Margaret Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson: A Biased Biography, J. D. Fergusson Art Foundation, Perth, 2010, pp.128-129).
Due to the cost of having sculptures cast, Fergusson would often exhibit plaster versions of them, with a note that the purchase price included foundry fees. Neither he nor Morris kept extant records of the piecemeal and sometimes posthumous casting of his sculptures but a plaster and brass version of Goat, at 21.5cm high, are in the collection of Perth Art Gallery, presented by the J. D. Fergusson Art Foundation in 1991. The Foundation was established by Morris in 1963, two years after Fergusson’s death, partly to secure and promote Fergusson’s legacy. Also in 1991, an unnumbered edition of ten casts of Goat, at a height of 10.5cm, was cast under the Foundation’s authority, from which the present work is number ten.