John Duncan Fergusson

Ewan Mundy Fine Art Ltd., Glasgow;
Private Collection

The canvas is original. One extremely close inspection there are one or two tiny lines of craquelure. Otherwise in good original condition, clean and ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals no sign of retouching. Held in a simply carved white painted wooden frame in fair condition.
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'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 on the French Riviera in the late 1920s Swimmers near the Sea depicts Fergusson's beautiful partner Margaret (Meg) Morris, the innovative dancer. She is seen at close quarters with her breasts exposed to the summer sun but shaded by the branches of trees growing in a grove beside the ocean. 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 pictures.

Swimmers near the Sea 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 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 many of the bathing pictures painted by Fergusson 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). In a comparable painting entitled Nude with Oranges and Sunlight of 1928, Fergusson suggested that the scene depicts a naked picnic amid the seclusion of the trees whilst the bathing cap worn by Meg in another work entitled Nude and Cliff (Sold Sotheby's, Gleneagles, 20 August 2006, lot 1030) suggests that she has been swimming like the present painting. The elements of the picnic and the bathing cap give the paintings a reality and imply that they were based upon Fergusson's observations of Meg as she enjoyed the sunlight of the south of France, uninhibited by her nudity.

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, although her bathing-cap suggest a more down-to-earth identity. 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)

The curved forms and statuesque proportions of Meg in Swimmers near the Sea resembles one of Fergusson's most notable sculptures, Eastre, Hymn to the Sun of 1924 which is extant in various plaster and brass versions.