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Descriptif du lot
Two years after settling in Paris, a city he would later describe as ‘simply a place of freedom’, J.D. Fergusson painted St Jacques Studio in 1909 (J.D. Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting, Glasgow, 1943, p. 70). That same year, he showed at the Venice Biennale for the first time, moved into a new studio in Montparnasse, and was elected a sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne, an honour he valued greatly: ‘to me, considering myself a revolutionary … this was a very great honour’ (Fergusson, quoted in M. Morris, The Art of J.D. Fergusson: A Biased Biography, Glasgow, 1974, p. 53). Such recognition from the Parisian avant-garde marked a decisive turning point, and a new assurance is palpable in the work of these months. Indeed, Kirsten Simister has identified 1909 as the year in which ‘Fergusson’s artistic confidence and ambition reached an all-time high’ (K. Simister, Living Paint: J.D. Fergusson 1874-1961, Edinburgh, 2001, p. 39).
At the centre, a young woman in a white dress seems caught mid-dance, her arm raised and her skirt swinging out in a great cream-coloured arc. Behind her, discs of orange and pale green – perhaps paper lanterns – hang against a ground of deep ultramarine. The lessons of the Fauvists are everywhere apparent: colour is laid down at full intensity; forms are bound by dark, decisive contours; and the skirt is built up in a thick, luminous impasto, enlivened with touches of pink and lilac.
The female figure – and in time dance itself – was to become one of Fergusson’s abiding subjects, and the present work anticipates the celebrated studies of movement that followed his meeting with the dancer Margaret Morris in 1913. The picture was shown repeatedly during Fergusson’s lifetime, from his 1932 exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery onwards, and was later selected for both the memorial exhibition that toured Scotland after his death in 1961, and the major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2013.
At the centre, a young woman in a white dress seems caught mid-dance, her arm raised and her skirt swinging out in a great cream-coloured arc. Behind her, discs of orange and pale green – perhaps paper lanterns – hang against a ground of deep ultramarine. The lessons of the Fauvists are everywhere apparent: colour is laid down at full intensity; forms are bound by dark, decisive contours; and the skirt is built up in a thick, luminous impasto, enlivened with touches of pink and lilac.
The female figure – and in time dance itself – was to become one of Fergusson’s abiding subjects, and the present work anticipates the celebrated studies of movement that followed his meeting with the dancer Margaret Morris in 1913. The picture was shown repeatedly during Fergusson’s lifetime, from his 1932 exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery onwards, and was later selected for both the memorial exhibition that toured Scotland after his death in 1961, and the major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2013.