Two works by JD Fergusson to be sold at auction next month

The auction is to be conducted by Lyon and Turnbull, and collectively the three works have an estimated sale value of between £125,000 and £185,000.

The Fergusson paintings, Kelvin Valley and Supper Dance, date from 1942 and 1902 respectively and are being offered for sale by Alan Arnott, whose parents James and Martha became close friends with Fergusson and Morris around the time of the Second World War. The later painting is expected to sell for up to £20,000, while Supper Dance has an estimate of between £10,000 and £15,000.

Mr Arnott, 74, now lives in the Dordogne region of France but grew up in houses in Saltcoats and in Glasgow which had several Fergusson paintings on the walls. To him, the artist and his wife were simply friends of his parents whom he always referred to as Fergus and Meg.

“The paintings came into the family from Meg after Fergus’s death,” said Mr Arnott in an exclusive interview with The Herald. “They were presents to my parents on separate occasions.

“Both of them I thought were wonderful. We had a number of other Fergussons in the house at the time because after Fergus died, Meg used to try and farm paintings out to be hung on walls … anyone who wanted, pretty much, could have one. We had about six on loan.”

On the back of Supper Dance there is even a dedication to the Arnotts from Morris. It reads: “Early Café drawing 1902, with love & blessings from Meg & Fergus, Glasgow May 1965.” 

Left, Scottish Art specialist Alice Strang, with JD Fergusson's Kelvin Valley and (behind) Supper Dance. Right, the written dedication on the reverse of Supper Dance (Image: Alex Robson/Canva)

As a child and later as a teenager, Mr Arnott was a regular visitor to the flat on Clouston Street in Glasgow’s West End in which Fergusson and Morris lived after their return from Paris at the outset of the Second World War. On family holidays to France in the 1950s, he and his parents would often meet up with the couple, and Martha Arnott regular sat regularly for Fergusson as a model. She can be seen in his 1952 work, Danu, Mother Of The Gods.

Mr Arnott’s father, a lecturer at Glasgow University who later founded the drama department and for whom the James Arnott Theatre is named, met Fergusson and Morris at the New Art Club, which they founded in Glasgow in 1940. Martha Arnott was a teacher of Margaret Morris Movement (MMM), the modern dance and movement therapy system Morris began developing in Paris in the 1910s and introduced across Britain in the 1920s through a number of dance schools.

It was through MMM that Mr Arnott made his first screen appearance.

“I was in a film about Margaret Morris Movement before I was born. Mum was pregnant and she was doing Margaret Morris Movement exercises and the Scottish Film Council or somebody made a film about it. So I’m credited in the film as The Bump. But the first time I remember Meg and Fergus I was probably about four, so I knew them on and off all my life.

“Fergus wasn’t at all scary. He treated children just like adults. It was as though he didn’t pander to you, he just spoke to you as an ordinary human being, which was not what I was generally used to. He put a bit of charcoal and paper in front of me and just said: ‘Draw.’ He encouraged me and helped me.”

Margaret Morris at the opening of her Cromwell Road School in London in 1935. (Image: Fred Daniels)

After Fergusson died in 1961, Morris stayed on in the Clouston Street flat and set about burnishing his legacy. Following the establishment of the JD Fergusson Art Foundation, of which James and Martha Arnott (and later also Mr Arnott) were committee members, The Fergusson Gallery in Perth was opened in 1992 with a large number of the works donated by Morris, as well as letters, documents, notebooks, sketchbooks.

John Duncan Fergusson was born in Leith in 1874. He initially wanted to be a naval surgeon, but dropped out of his medicine course at Edinburgh University intent on becoming a painter instead. For a decade he travelled between Edinburgh and Paris, sometimes in the company of fellow Scottish Colourist Samuel Peploe, then moved permanently to the French capital in 1907.

There he embedded himself in an art scene which contained artists such as Picasso and Matisse. He met Morris in Paris in 1913 when she was 22 and he was 39.

Paris was a revelation for Fergusson according to Alice Strang, Senior Scottish Art Specialist at Lyon and Turnbull and previously a senior curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, where she put together a major Fergusson retrospective in 2014. But Paris also gained much from the Scot.

“He not only witnesses but plays a part in the birth of modern art as we know it,” she said. “He’s meeting people like Picasso and he’s seeing the very latest work by people like Matisse – very shortly after they’re painted, in the flesh as it were, before they’re even reproduced in journals in black and white in Britain.

“I think he thought the whole bustling restaurant and café scene in Paris was absolutely marvellous, and would sit taking it all in and sketching. What you see in Supper Dance is his admiration for the chic clientele and that chic night life.”

READ MORE: ARTIST PROFILE - JD FERGUSSON

Fergusson and Morris moved to London at the start of World War One, returned to Paris in 1929 and then moved to Glasgow a decade later when war broke out again. Fergusson chose Scotland’s largest city because to him it appeared more creative. It also appealed both to his Bohemian nature and the anti-establishment beliefs he had honed through his exposure to, and participation in, the Modernists movement. Alongside Morris he soon became an essential and central figure on the Glasgow cultural scene. It was in this milieu that he painted Kelvin Valley.

“What is striking about the Kelvin Valley painting is that firstly it’s very distinctly of his Glasgow period,” said Ms Strang. “There’s a couple of tones of green and of pink that he developed very much as part of his palette in those Glasgow years. It immediately takes you to Glasgow during and after World War Two.

“The second thing that strikes you with Kelvin Valley when you see it for real is that it’s a jewel of a painting. It’s quite an intimate scale, but it’s incredibly powerful at the same time as being quite a gentle picture. It’s this lovely pastoral scene. So it packs a soft beautiful punch.”

Also in the upcoming sale is Still Life With Tulips, painted by Francis Cadell in the 1920s and bought for £65 by Edinburgh accountant John Scott Hutton in 1943, six years after the artist’s death.

“It’s being seen in public for the first time in 80 years,” said Ms Strang. “It’s an incredibly beautiful painting and shows Cadell at the height of his powers in the early 1920s and at a time when his friendship with the other Scottish Colourist SJ Peploe was particularly close because they’re both painting tulips at this point.”

Lyon and Turnbull’s Scottish Paintings and Sculpture sale takes place in two sessions on June 8 at the company’s Edinburgh auction rooms.