EDINBURGH, UK — The 150th anniversary of the birth of the Colorist painter John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961) is being marked at Lyon & Turnbull on Thursday, June 6. The firm’s twice-yearly offering of Scottish art includes 17 works by the artist who was born in Leith, near Edinburgh, Scotland in 1874.
Fergusson has the most international reputation of the group of four artists known as the Scottish Colorists. He lived in Paris before both the First and the Second World Wars, was a Londoner from 1914 to 1929, and had three solo exhibitions in America in the 1930s. He was also the only sculptor amongst the Colorists, making and exhibiting three-dimensional works in stone and bronze for more than 35 years.
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 and watercolors, 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 color and unrefined technique of the Fauves, he traded the controlled, realist technique of Edwardian portraits for bolder brushstrokes and layered colors. 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. It has an estimate of £100,000-£150,000 ($127,000-$191,000).
Both Boulevard Edgar Quinet (estimated at £40,000-£60,000, or $51,000-$76,000) and Montgeron (estimated at £20,000-£30,000, or $25,000-$38,000), oils measuring 14 by 10.5in (35 by 27cm), date 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 a series of vibrant Parisian street scenes painted in the period, with Montgeron depicting a commune about 12 miles (19 kilometers) to the southeast of Paris where Fergusson painted during the summer of 1909.
Among the later works is Blonde in the South (estimated at £60,000-£80,000, or $76,000-$102,000), a portrait that is 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.
The two small bronzes offered in the June 6 sale are posthumous casts from 1991: the cropped female form Torse de Femme, sculpted in 1918 and from an edition of 10 (estimated at £6,000-£8,000) and Goat, conceived in 1921, which was acquired from the artist’s widow Margaret Morris (estimated at £3,000-£5,000, or $3,800-$6,400).
In the footsteps of Monet, Fergusson painted at the small seaside resort of Pourville-sur-Mer, near Dieppe. Among the most ‘finished’ of the works on paper in the lineup is a charcoal and watercolor titled The Plage and Cliff, Pourville that is dated 1926. It has an estimate of £4,000-£6,000 ($5,100-$7,600).
