John Duncan Fergusson valuation
The Scottish Colourist who went furthest into Paris modernism and never came all the way back.
John Duncan Fergusson was born in Leith in 1874, abandoned medicine for painting, and taught himself largely by copying in the Louvre.
What a work by John Duncan Fergusson is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
John Duncan Fergusson was born in Leith in 1874, abandoned medicine for painting, and taught himself largely by copying in the Louvre. Of the four Scottish Colourists he was the one who lived the movement rather than visiting it: settled in Paris from 1907, exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne, art editor of the magazine Rhythm, and closely involved with the Fauves and with the dancer Margaret Morris, his partner for the rest of his life. The work runs from thickly painted Paris cafe scenes and South of France nudes to hard-edged rhythmic figure paintings and, later, Highland landscapes made after he settled in Glasgow. He died in 1961.
The output spans sixty years and several manners, and where a picture sits in that sequence is the first question a valuation asks — the Paris and Antibes years are a different market from the late Scottish work. He painted on canvas, on panel and on board, and made sculpture in brass and stone as well as a large quantity of drawings. Signature is usually a plain Fergusson, often lower right, and dating is frequently absent, so exhibition labels and the Fergusson collection at Perth Art Gallery, which holds the estate archive, do the work.
At a glance
- Born
- 9 March 1874, Leith
- Died
- 30 January 1961, Glasgow
Peploe, Paris-Plage and the New Art Club
Fergusson briefly trained as a naval surgeon before teaching himself to paint, and first went to Paris in 1898 to study in the Louvre. Between 1904 and 1909 he and Peploe painted together at Paris-Plage and along the coast. His first one-man show was at the Baillie Gallery in London before he settled in Paris, and in 1923 the Glasgow dealer Alexander Reid organised the next.
From 1939 he and Margaret Morris lived in Glasgow, where in 1940 he founded the New Art Club, out of which came the New Scottish Group with him as its first president, and in 1943 he published Modern Scottish Painting. Morris gave fourteen of his paintings to the University of Stirling in 1968, and the Fergusson Gallery in Perth, opened in 1992, became part of Perth Art Gallery in 2022.
Anne Estelle Rice, Portsmouth and the return to Paris
Fergusson left the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh, finding its teaching too rigid, and taught himself on journeys to Morocco and Spain as well as France. In Paris he met the American illustrator Anne Estelle Rice, whom he encouraged to paint and who appears in many of his canvases of those years, and in February 1924 Alexander Reid included him in a four-man exhibition at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris.
In 1918 the Admiralty gave him permission to visit the naval dockyard at Portsmouth, and the paintings he made from those visits, among them Portsmouth Docks at the University of Stirling, show the influence of Vorticism. He and Margaret Morris lived in Paris again from 1928 until 1939. The collection at Perth Art Gallery includes his sculpture, sketchbooks, letters and photographs as well as oils, and in 2025 blue plaques were put up at the house in Clouston Street in Glasgow where the couple lived from 1939.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
