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Piccadilly Circus, Night is a small, vibrant panel and an important early example of Fergusson’s impressionism. He had worked on panel, on the spot, for some years, mostly in Edinburgh. In the proceeding years he made yearly visits to the Pas de Calais, often to Paris-Plage, Le Touquet sometimes with his friend S.J. Peploe. In 1907, he moved to Paris and continued to paint street scenes at night, recalling this earlier London example. Piccadilly was described by Charles Dickens Jr as …the great thoroughfare leading from the Haymarket and Regent-street westward to Hyde Park-corner, is the nearest approach to the Parisian boulevard of which London can boast. The Circus lost it circular form in the 1880s with the remodelling of the Regent Street Quadrant and the building of Shaftesbury Avenue. By the end of the 19th Century, it was the heart of theatre land, the brilliantly lit hub it remains today. The Alfred Gilbert statue of Anteros surmounts a fountain forming the Earl of Shaftesbury Memorial. Its delicate form is captured brilliantly by Fergusson with a few deft strokes grounding the location, highlighted against the lights of the buildings beyond. The bustle of humanity, indications of horsedrawn cars, the dirty gas light, all convey the atmosphere of excitement and the theatrical character of the architectural setting connected to the painter’s sense of possibility and change: a new century, the Edwardian era, new freedoms for artists willing to engage and respond. Dr James Ritchie, an important Edinburgh collector many of whose paintings are now held in the National collection, bought several paintings in Glasgow accompanied by Fergusson himself who, as Dr Ritchie recalled, paused in front of each work and said ‘Good Fergusson’. 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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