J D Fergusson Quotes

“In 1907, the 33-year-old John Duncan Fergusson arrived in Paris from Edinburgh in search of a studio. He found one in the Boulevard Edgar Quinet in Montparnasse, a quartier which had usurped Montmartre as the destination for painters, sculptors, dancers, writers and musicians. Paris was an artistic and international maelstrom, where not being French was no disadvantage for an aspiring artist - Picasso, Gris, Modigliani, Chagall were just a few of the émigrés who settled in the city. There was also soon to be a coterie of British and American artists - including Jesssie King and her husband E.A. Taylor, Jessica Dismorr, Anne Estelle Rice, and Fergusson's Edinburgh friend S.J. Peploe - who seemed to find in Fergusson a natural spokesman, even leader.”
― Roger Billcliffe, J.D. Fergusson 150

“J.D. Fergusson is both a painter and a sculptor. He was born of Highland parents, is a true Celt, and worked in Paris both before and after the War. Since 1909, he has exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, and the influence of France must be upon him. Yet whatever impressions he has garnered in France, no Frenchman could have painted Fergusson's pictures. There is nothing imitative in his work; rather it is the expression of an unusually strong personailty. His compositions have attracted the French critics by their pleasing, unforced originality, kept always in bounds by an austere sense of good taste. Strength combined with grace characterises his pictures, and also his most attractive statuettes.”
― Marten Cumberland