John Duncan Fergusson 1874-1961

Glasgow, Christies, 18 December 1980, lot 33;
London, Portland Gallery, June - July 2002, no. 33;
Private collection

'The latter half of Fergusson's painting career was dominated by his exuberant images of bathers and nudes, which for many hold an enduring appeal. Their vibrant colour and mood of exoticism and sensuality convey his immense love of life and capacity to appreciate its simplest pleasures.' (Kirsten Simister, Living Paint; J. D. Fergusson 1874-1961, 2001, p. 110)

Painted in 1928 Nude with Palm Fronds depicts Fergusson's beautiful partner Margaret (Meg) Morris, the innovative dancer and painter. Her athletic physique is depicted against a background of palm leaves. Unlike Hunter, Peploe and Cadell who painted very few nudes after their student years, Fergusson found the naked human form highly inspiring and produced a series of striking nudes throughout his career. The nude had been an important subject to the Fauves, from Matisse's controversial Blue Nude of 1907 and Derain's Three Bathers of the same year. Fergusson was a great admirer of such works and the monumentality of these nudes permeated into his own work.

Nude with Palm Fronds was probably based upon sketches made by Fergusson of Meg and other models on the private beach owned by George Davidson at his idyllic Chateau des Enfants at Antibes which became the Fergusson's summer retreat for many years. Fergusson had found the house for Davidson when he was seeking a place in the sun, in 1920. The chateau had been little more than a ruin among the woods that lined the coast at Antibes, built sixty years earlier by King Leopold of Belgium but not completed. Davidson made the chateau into a beautiful haven where Fergusson and Meg found respite from the bustle of Paris, spending their time swimming in the azure ocean from the rocks and painting among the trees. Meg described the setting for Nude and Cliff thus; 'The Cap d'Antibes runs nearly two miles out to the sea. The chateau woods ran to a bay facing due south, with cliffs of jagged rocks about twelve feet high, and water about fifteen feet deep. Lovely for diving... everyone bathed off the rocks and afterwards sun-bathed in the woods or on the rocks. When they got too hot, they dived into the sea again' (Margaret Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson; A Biased Biography, 1974, p. 150).

Rather than inhabiting the landscape, Fergusson incorporated the organic curves and angles of the female form into the rhythms of the trees and the ocean beyond. Like a primordial goddess of nature or dryad, she symbolises the undulating symphonies of nature. Fergusson's philosophy was based upon his understanding of the writings of Henri-Bergson, whose principal of elan-vital (feminine life-force) became influential around the time that Fergusson arrived in Paris 1907 when he published Creative Evolution. The English literary critic John Middleton Murry, who met Fergusson in Paris in 1910, explained the importance Fergusson placed upon the central idea of Bergsonism; 'One word was recurrent in all our strange discussions - the word "rhythm"... For Fergusson it (rhythm) was the essential quality in a painting or sculpture; and since it was at that moment that the Russian Ballet first came to Western Europe for a season at the Chatelet, dancing was obviously linked, by rhythm, with the plastic arts. From that, it was but a short step to the position that rhythm was the distinctive element in all the arts, and that the real purpose of 'this modern movement' - a phrase frequent on Fergusson's lips - was to reassert the pre-eminence of rhythm.' (ibid Simister, p. 48)