Alice Strang
19 February 2024
This Spring we are marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson with a touring exhibition of his work. Organised in partnership with The Fleming Collection, it celebrates half a century of creativity through paintings and sculptures lent from private collections and from Flemings’ holdings.
John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961) was born in Leith, near Edinburgh. He is one of four artists, along with F. C. B. Cadell, G. L. Hunter and S. J. Peploe, who are known as the Scottish Colourists and who are revered as the masters of modern Scottish art.
Fergusson has the most international reputation of the group, not least due to key periods spent living in Paris before World War One and during the 1930s, as well as in London between 1914 and 1929. As the longest-lived of the Colourists, he also played an important role in the Scottish art world after World War Two, from a base in Glasgow.
The works on display follow Fergusson’s emergence as an artist of sophistication in Edwardian Edinburgh, to his role in the development of modern art in Paris. Also clear is the inspiration he found in the Scottish Highlands and his joy in portraying the pupils of the Summer Schools held in France by his wife, the dance pioneer Margaret Morris (1891-1974). The sculptures reveal Fergusson’s lesser-known but significant talent as the only sculptor amongst the Colourists, led by the renowned Eástre (Hymn to the Sun) of 1924.
Highlights include John Jonquils and Silver of 1905, which pays testament to Fergusson’s friendship Peploe. They met in Edinburgh in about 1900 and were particularly close during the years they both lived in Paris between 1910 and 1912. They shared an early admiration for artists including Eduoard Manet and Diego Velázquez, whose work they were able to see in the French capital in the 1890s and whose influence can be seen in this beautiful still life.
In a manner similar to that employed by Peploe in a series of contemporary paintings, Fergusson has set his props of Adam Revival style silver salts and a pepper pot on a white tablecloth, arranged before a dark background. A sense of a sophisticated lifestyle is underlined by the inclusion of the jonquils, which represent ‘a token of desire’ in the language of flowers. Fergusson’s technical virtuosity is clear, for example, in the depiction of the reflections on the surface of the silverware.
In 1907, Fergusson decided to move from Edinburgh to Paris, where he was to live until 1913. This was made possible thanks to an inheritance following his father’s death the year before and was encouraged by meeting the American artist, Anne Estelle Rice, in Paris-Plage in the summer. He declared ‘Paris is simply a place of freedom’ and rented a studio in Montparnasse, the celebrated artists’ quarter.
Fergusson embarked upon a series of vibrant Parisian street scenes, such as Boulevard Montparnasse of 1907. His excitement about his new surroundings is clear, as he revelled in the depiction of the city’s architecture and citizens. His brushwork became bolder and his palette brighter in deftly captured scenes of daily life.
Fergusson’s first studio in Paris was at 18 boulevard Edgar Quinet. His widow, Margaret Morris, explained that ‘it overlooked the cemetery, [was] very peaceful and ...[had]... a rent at that time of £12 a year.’ Anchored between the shop blind on the left and the boundary provided by the tree on the right, he presents us with a street scene through which the viewer’s gaze is drawn from empty foreground, to a tree-centred bustle of activity and over roofs to a hazy sky. With a confident command of modernist technique, form is indicated by way of distinct brushstrokes, whilst highlights of bright colours, including red and turquoise, enliven the composition and suggest a response to the brighter light of France compared to that of Scotland.
Oil on board | Private Collection | (c) Courtesy of Culture Perth & Kinross Museums & Galleries
This sculpture was inspired by a distinctive breed of goat owned by Fergusson and Morris’s patron, the businessman George Davison. Morris’s Summer School of 1919 was held at his home, Wern Fawr, in Harlech, north Wales and she recalled: ‘They were mountain goats, used to living and breeding among rocky crags...What fascinated Fergus was the way their hair grew...it was long but stood out in frills round their legs, like trousers. Fergus made endless sketches of them....[and]...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.’
Bronze | Private Collection | Image by Philip Connor
After fifteen years spent in London, Fergusson moved back to Paris, where he lived until the outbreak of World War Two. Bathers, Antibes of 1937 encapsulates the active, outdoor lifestyle he and Morris enjoyed during the Summer Schools she ran in the south of France. In 1923 the school was held in Antibes for the first time and the following year Morris and her dancers posed for photographs which were used to launch the first summer season at the Cap d’Antibes, which is now one of the world’s most luxurious resorts.
This painting depicts some of Morris’s pupils at a bathing place cut into the cliffs. The red forms are hand-rails and ladders which were installed in the warmer months. As Morris recalled: “Everyone bathed off the rocks and afterwards sun-bathed in the woods or on the rocks. When they got too hot, they dived into the sea again. Fergus [sic] got much inspiration and did hundreds of sketches over the years, from which he painted many pictures.’ An Art Deco stylishness can be seen in this sunkissed image of healthy, suntanned women.
Fergusson made and exhibited sculpture for over 35 years, with a concentrated period of productivity immediately after World War One. This co-incided with a parallell development in Margaret Morris Movement, the dance technique devised by his partner.
Eástre (Hymn to the Sun) of 1924 (cast 1991) is his best-known sculpture, not least because two posthumous editions of it exist. Fergusson made it in plaster in 1924, but kept it under his bed for three years before he could afford to have it cast in brass. Eástre is the Saxon goddess of Spring and the rising sun. This work is believed to be a portrait of Morris, who devised a ballet of the same title inspired by the music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Reflective brass was popular in the 1920s as a way to signify modernity.
This work is a powerful depiction of female physicality. It embodies key themes in Fergusson’s sculptural practice: the cropped female form, an interest in non-Western sculpture and a sleek modernism, based on curves and planes with particular attention paid to the breasts, bottom and the base of the spine. It pays testament to the sculptors with whose work Fergusson would have been familiar in pre-war Paris, such as Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Archipenko and Jacob Epstein.
Bronze | Private Collection | Image by Philip Connor
Despite the deaths of his fellow Scottish Colourists during the 1930s, it was a propitious decade for Fergusson, not least with the acquisition of La Déesse de la Rivière (River Goddess) by the French state in 1931. By 1936 Fergusson was President of Le Groupe d’Artistes Anglo-Américains, whilst four solo exhibitions in London meant he also maintained a high profile in Britain. Blonde in the South encapsulates the optimism of much of Fergusson’s oeuvre. It combines his appreciation of beautiful women with his love of the south of France, where the warm climate, quality of Mediterranean light and carefree summer months resulted in many of his most joyful paintings.
Oil on canvas | Private Collection | Image by Philip Connor
The first solo show of Fergusson’s work during his lifetime was held in London in 1905 and the last was staged in Glasgow in 1957. We are therefore delighted that this exhibition is being presented in those cities, both of which played an important role in his career. The exhibition will visit our Connaught Street gallery in London from 19 February to 01 March 2024 before traveling to Glasgow, opening at our Bath Street gallery from 11 to 22 March 2024.
An exhibition in partnership with The Fleming Collection.
Illustrated:
Top: John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961) | Eástre (Hymn to the Sun), 1924 (cast 1991) | Bronze, 42cm high
Private Collection | Courtesy of Culture Perth & Kinross Museums & Galleries
Image Grid 2: John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961) | Jonquils and Silver, 1905 | Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 45.7cm | The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, London | (c) Courtesy of Culture Perth & Kinross Museums & Galleries
Image Grid 3: John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961) | Bathers, Antibes, 1937 | Oil on canvas, 65.6 x 54cm | Private Collection | (c) Courtesy of Culture Perth & Kinross Museums & Galleries
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All London exhibition images by Philip Connor.
