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In August 1913, Fergusson was in Cassis with his partner Anne Estelle Rice, accompanying S.J. Peploe, his wife Margaret and their son Willy. It was both artists’ first visit to the South of France and their choice of the small fishing village near Marseilles may have been inspired by the many French painters who had worked there before, including Paul Signac. It was Fergusson who recalled persuading Peploe to accompany him after seeing a poster with the name ‘Cassis’ on it near his Paris Studio. Fergusson recalled in 1945 in his Memories of Peploe that at first he thought it would be too hot for ‘Bill,’ but he decided to take the risk. We arrived to find it quite cool and Bill didn’t suffer at all. We had his (third) birthday there and after a lot of consideration chose a bottle of Château Lafite instead of champagne. Lafite now always means to me that happy lunch on the verandah overlooking Cassis bay, sparkling in the sunshine. As in Royan three years before, both painters worked chiefly on panel, although Fergusson used several canvasses and both made many sketches, particularly of the harbour and its traffic of schooners. It may have been a difficult time for Fergusson and Rice who were to separate shortly; Fergusson had already met Margaret Morris in the spring when she had brought a troupe of her dancers to Paris to perform at the Marigny Theatre. Fergusson, whose Paris studio had been demolished, decided to stay in the south. By Christmas, he was renting a little house at Cap d’Antibes where he persuaded Morris to join him and where they spent the summer of the next year before the outbreak of War forced their return to London. The group stayed in the Hotel Panorama, which forms the backdrop to the portrait, with its distinctive round pediment on the façade and screened verandah below. Peploe painted the same view when he returned with Willy, Denis and Margaret in 1924. At this time, Fergusson was seeking more structure in his compositions the simplification of motif recalls the later Cézanne. The paint was applied in short, directional brush marks and the palette restrained. In recollection, he has captured the calm strength of his subject with her young child, confident in motherhood. Guy Peploe
[Fergusson] is a poet with an acute sense for the discipline of form. He has an instinct for the rhythm which makes sense out of a picture just as it informs the shape and meaning of a dance. His pictures and his sculptures seem to move with a musical rhythm. Robins Millar, Glasgow Evening Citizen, May 5th 1948
Born in Leith in Edinburgh, J.D. Fergusson’s studies took him to Paris in the 1890s where he attended the Académie Colarossi and made broad connections in avant-garde life. He exhibited in London in 1905 and finally settled in Paris in 1907 where he experimented with Fauvist and Cubist styles, became a Sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne and acquaintance of many of the leading figures in the movement, including Picasso and Braque. He had four works exhibited in Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition in London, 1913. He lived between France and Britain, eventually settling in Glasgow with his life partner and the pioneering dancer Margaret Morris.
Everyone in Scotland should refuse to have anything to do with black or dirty and dingy colour, and insist on clean colours in everything. I remember when I was young any colour was considered a sign of vulgarity. Greys and blacks were the only colours for people of taste and refinement. Good pictures had to be black, grey, brown or drab. Well! Let’s forget it, and insist on things in Scotland being of colour that makes for and associates itself with light, hopefulness, health and happiness. J.D. Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting, 1943
J. D. Fergusson & The Scottish Gallery
J.D. Fergusson exhibited with The Scottish Gallery in 1923. The exhibition included both small-scale sculpture he had produced over the preceding few years and his Highland series of oil paintings, which represented the artist’s engagement with his native landscape and culture. Twenty years before, he had been one of the purchasers of work from his friend S.J. Peploe’s first exhibition with The Gallery, but in the intervening years he had looked to London and then Paris for his commercial and spiritual existence. It would only be after his second flight from the continent, in the face of WWII, that Scotland would take the central place in his work and thoughts. Fergusson was a paragon of the bohemian life and one of the major contributors to British modernism – uncompromising, Modernist and brilliant. A Memorial exhibition was held for Fergusson at The Scottish Gallery in 1961, and numerous exhibitions have been held since.
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