J. D. Fergusson's Painting Rhythm

Abstract

Anne Estelle Rice, who painted the portrait of Katherine Mansfield that appeared on the cover of the first issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies, wrote of Mansfield long after her death: ‘She smoked far too much; the box of cigarettes was rarely out of her hands’.1 J. D. Fergusson however gave up smoking for good during the time that he and Mansfield were friends as he wanted to see better and more clearly. As the cover of this issue of the journal suggests, he particularly wanted to see vibrant colour unclouded by smoke. He had moved to Paris from Edinburgh in 1907 because he found the conservatism of the Scottish art world constricting. Before he moved he was painting portraits that resembled James McNeill Whistler’s work, sensitive realistic renderings of the subject, often in full figure and using a muted palette. In Paris he was dazzled by the adventurousness he found, especially in the work of the Fauvist, Henri Matisse. The colours in Matisse’s picture Bonheur de vivre, for instance, are raw and wild, and the image has an overt and seductively erotic sensuousness. The scene is mythological, not the Garden of Eden but a vision of unregulated and partly at least homoerotic sexual pleasure. Fergusson immediately responded to the stimulus of postimpressionist radicalism and altered his palette, his conception of the picture plane and his subject. Though Fergusson is now usually identified as a Scottish Colourist, together with S. J. Peploe, G. L. Hunter and F. C. B. Cadell, his work differs significantly from theirs. In Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century he began to paint nudes, often inviting a mythological interpretation, whereas the work of the other Colourists lacks this dimension. His impetus came partly from an interest in the work of Henri Bergson which was the subject of his and Anne Estelle Rice’s first conversation with JohnMiddletonMurry, in the Cafe