Nick Curnow
12 June 2024
Stellar works by the Scottish Colourists met a rousing reception at our recent Scottish Paintings & Sculpture sale featuring John Duncan Fergusson at 150 on the evening of 06 June 2024.
Confirming the continued buoyancy at the top end of the Scottish art market – and Lyon & Turnbull’s position as international market leaders for dedicated Scottish art auctions - the total for the 165 sold works was over £2.45m.
Leading the line at £425,201 was Still Life with Fruit and Flowers by Samuel John Peploe (1871-1935).
Exceptional for its radical palette and cropped and asymmetrical composition, it was painted in the period shortly after the end of World War One when the artist – having experienced the work of leading French artists including Matisse and Cézanne at first hand whilst living in Paris between 1910 and 1912 - was embarking on a new series of brightly coloured flower paintings.
He and fellow Colourist F.C.B Cadell were also working particularly closely together. They lived just a few minutes’ walk from each other in Edinburgh’s famous New Town: Cadell at Ainslie Place and Peploe on India Street with a studio at nearby Shandwick Place.
The bold lilac background to this painting is a direct reference to the colour with which Cadell painted the first floor at Ainslie Place. Some of the props in the painting - the orange-rimmed plate, the beribboned black fan and a blue-glazed jug – are those used in the paintings of both artists.
The work was selected for inclusion in the memorial exhibition of Peploe’s work mounted at the McLellan Galleries, Glasgow in 1937, following the artist’s death in Edinburgh in 1935.
SOLD FOR £425,201
Marigolds with the Yellow Cup by George Leslie Hunter (1877-1931) sold at £118,951. Painted in the 1920s when the artist was at the peak of his powers, Hunter brings a complex series of objects and patterned fabrics together into asymmetrical balance.
This is the sister picture to the painting Peonies in a Chinese Vase in the Fleming Collection, London, that was chosen as the cover image for Bill Smith and Jill Marriner’s monograph Hunter Revisited: The Life and Art of Leslie Hunter (2012).
SOLD FOR £118,951
Hunter's Villefranche was painted on a perfect summer’s day in Villefranche-sur-Mer, a hillside town on the Côte d’Azur, an area that Hunter visited regularly between 1927 and 1929. While there, he created many works on paper, using pen and ink, coloured chalk and pastel but this painting is one of just a few fully resolved south of France oils.
SOLD FOR £100,201
A beautiful and rare painting by Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864-1933) went well over hopes of £30,000-50,000 to also bring £100,201. Signed and dated 1894, A Japanese Tea Garden dates from Hornel’s landmark trip to Japan with his friend and fellow Glasgow Boy George Henry in 1893-94.
Hornel revelled in the customs, clothing and decorative schemes that he witnessed but also photography – pictures he took himself or bought from commercial photographers – to inform his imagery. The 44 Japanese works he exhibited at Alexander Reid’s gallery La Société des Beaux-Arts in Glasgow in 1895 met a triumphant reception with all but one sold.
A Japanese Tea Garden had a distinguished provenance, by direct descent from the leading Glaswegian patron of the arts William Davidson (1861-1945) - and had not been seen in public since it was shown in the Scottish Arts Council’s touring exhibition Mr Henry and Mr Hornel visit Japan of 1978-79.
SOLD FOR £100,201
The 150th anniversary of the birth of John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961) was marked with 17 works by the artist who was born in Leith, near Edinburgh in 1874.
Fergusson has perhaps the most international reputation of the group of four artists known as the Scottish Colourists. He lived in Paris before both the First and Second World Wars, was a Londoner from 1914 until 1929 and had three solo exhibitions in America in the 1920s. He was also the only sculptor amongst the Colourists, making and exhibiting three-dimensional works in stone and bronze for over 35 years.
“The night belonged to the Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson, with the paintings, sculptures, works on paper and even one of his sketchbooks celebrating the 150th anniversary of his birth being 100% sold and achieving over half a million pounds in total.”
- Alice Strang, Senior Specialist
The group of works offered in Edinburgh represent a cross section of Fergusson’s output: finished oils from various dates in the first decades of the 20th century, works on paper, including drawings, watercolours and one of Fergusson’s sketchbooks.
Rose in the Hair dates from 1908, the year after Fergusson moved to Paris to experience the crucible of European modern art. Influenced by the undiluted colour and free technique of the Fauves, he traded the controlled, realist technique of Edwardian portraits for bolder brushstrokes and layered colours.
Three of Fergusson’s frequent sitters have been suggested as the subject for this oil: his lover and fellow artist Anne Estelle Rice, the American writer Elizabeth Dryden or the haute couture business-owner Yvonne de Kerstratt. Fergusson kept Rose in the Hair all his life and selected it for inclusion in solo exhibitions of his work in 1949 (when it was priced at £100) and 1950.
SOLD FOR £243,951
Two small oils Boulevard Edgar Quinet and Montgeron both dated from 1909, a key year in Fergusson’s career when he exhibited at the Venice Biennale for the first time and moved to a new light and orderly studio, at 83 rue Notre Dame des Champs. Boulevard Edgar Quinet comes from of a series of vibrant Parisian street scenes painted in the period with Montgeron depicting a commune some 19 kilometres to the south-east of Paris where Fergusson painted during the summer of 1909.
Boulevard Edgar Quinet comes from of a series of vibrant Parisian street scenes which Fergusson began shortly after arriving in the French capital. 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.
SOLD FOR £87,701
Montgeron is a commune some 19 kilometres to the south-east of Paris. Fergusson is known to have painted there during the summer of 1909. In this work he uses a favoured conceit of trees placed in the frontal plane to frame a scene within. Architecture is reduced to its geometric essence and planes of colour are outlined in black, showing the dramatic progress he had made since moving to Paris two years earlier. A larger version of this work, painted on canvas and dated 1909, is in the collection of Glasgow Life (Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, acc.no.3172).
SOLD FOR £40,201
Among the later works on offer was Blonde in the South, a portrait signed, dated and inscribed ‘Paris 28 Nov ’37'. The sun-kissed image, infused with the optimism of much of Fergusson’s oeuvre, combines his appreciation of beautiful women with his love of the south of France where he spent many summers until a final visit in 1960.
