J.D. Fergusson is one of the four artists commonly referred to as the Scottish Colourists.
Fergusson’s most celebrated for his figure studies and this goes hand in hand with his
partner, the dance pioneer, Margaret Morris.
They lived a very modern lifestyle. They were both immensely successful in their respective
fields and they were at the forefront of artistic endeavour.
Well right from the start, I think they had a lot in common. They then began that, I suppose,
cross-fertilisation of ideas that then ran on throughout their career.
So Fergusson was essentially self-taught. The artistic training that was available in
Edinburgh where he grew up was the Trustees School of Art, where you would sit for two
years sketching casts of classical statues, and that had very little appeal for Fergusson;
he wanted to be outside and living life. So what he did was go to Paris in the 1890’s
and attended sporadically the Academies Julian and Colarossi, which were more informal and
where you had access to a live, naked, female model.
Of the colourists, Fergusson had the most international outlook from the very beginning
of his career, and his first ever solo exhibition was held in London at the Baillie Gallery
in 1905. And some of the works that were most praised in that show were portraits, including
of himself and of his then girlfriend Jean Maconochie. And in fact, Fergusson’s friends
and lovers appear in many of his best paintings.
When he moved to Paris his partner was the American painter Anne Estelle-Rice, and she
appears in wonderful paintings like Le Manteau Chinois. But her American friend, the writer
Elizabeth Dryden, also sat for some of his most celebrated paintings like, The Red Shawl,
and then of course, Margaret Morris and her dancers.
Margaret Morris was an extraordinary person. She had set up her own dance school in London
in 1910 at the age of nineteen and brought her dance troupe to Paris in 1913 which is
where she met Fergusson. And not only did her pupils inspire Fergusson, but really the
ethos of the summer school embodied the ethos that Fergusson and Meg lived their life by
which was an outside lifestyle, in the sunshine, sunbathing, swimming in the sea and you see
that in many of his most affectionate paintings.
We’re very lucky to have an archive of material which gives us a very personal link to J.D.
Fergusson. Much of it comes from private collectors but also from Margaret Morris who donated
it to the J.D. Fergusson Foundation.
This letter dates from 1914, just a year after Fergusson and Margaret met for the first time.
By this point Fergusson had moved to Antibes in the south of France, and he writes to her,
advising on costume design and set design for her ballet dancers. This beautiful letter
has lots of sketches by Fergusson which outline his ideas and really marked the beginning
of a collaboration which lasted until his death in 1961.
You see, they had this marvellous relationship and they didn’t overstep the boundaries.
I mean, Fergus was painting, although, as we now discover, Margaret was quite a, you
know a skilled painter herself. But Margaret, of course, adored Fergusson’s paintings,
and of course after he died, she set up the J.D. Fergusson Art Foundation to look after
the collection. The responsibility of this collection hidden from public eye was a thing
that we couldn’t shoulder. So we wrote to four galleries in Scotland and of the four,
Perth came up with the astonishing proposal that they would turn the old waterworks into
a permanent Fergusson gallery.
Fergusson felt very much that his ancestral roots, which lay in Perthshire as his parents
had been born here he very much felt that they were the source of his creativity and
he also felt that he was in a way born without a language because he wasn’t a Gaelic speaker.
So using his art to search for a language and a voice and in a big way his identity,
as well, was something that became increasingly important to him.
The New Art Club was something which, as well as bringing together artists and writers and
things, an offshoot of that was the New Scottish Group. And so that was another thread of what
he did in that sort of later period of his career, supporting younger independent artists.
Fergusson himself was very much anti-establishment and he felt that sort of radical art and new
art should be supported.
It was really trying to create that type of artistically fertile atmosphere that Fergusson
had benefited from back in 1910 in Paris, in Glasgow at the time.
So while Fergusson is best known for his depictions of the female form, another very important
aspect of his work, are his less well known, landscapes and there are two particular series.
The first were based on sketches he made in Portsmouth docks, right at the end of the
First World War. They show Fergusson’s personal interpretation of vorticism and we know that,
for example, Wyndham Lewis the leading vorticist was a member of Margaret Morris’ social
club in London so they would have known each other.
Another important series of landscapes that Fergusson made, were following a motoring
tour of the Scottish Highlands in 1922 with his friend;
the businessman and writer, John Ressich
And in fact, he showed fifteen of them in his first ever solo exhibition in
Scotland, which was held at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh.
I think that Fergusson’s reputation is really based on the key six years he spent in Paris
before the First World War. He moved over in 1907, basically penniless, not knowing
anyone, not speaking anyone, and yet he got to grips with what was happening with the
birth of modern art and became the leader of a now celebrated group of Anglo- American
artists and writers. And he was able to see and digest at first-hand the very latest paintings
by people like, Picasso and Derain and Matisse and make them his own. And really for me that’s
epitomised in a wonderful series of female nudes that he painted in about 1910, which
are incredibly radical and not very well-known. They were shown a few times in London before
the First World War but then were not seen for decades thereafter, I think because they
are so daring and really those nudes place him amongst the most important modern British
artists.