Art Sunday pictures 'The Fergusson Gallery', Perth.

the cover to the gallery guide

These are ( most of) the photos I either took my self or scanned from the gallery guide on Saturday.

Art Sunday D J Fergusson

Yesterday I spend an hour or so wandering around the Fergusson Gallery in Perth. The first pleasant surprise was the gallery itself. It’s a grade A listed structure originally built as Perths first Waterworks. It was designed by Dr Adam Anderson ( engineer and then rector of Perth Academy) and completed in 1832. It’s one of Scotlands best cast iron industrial monuments.
It’s also the earliest known example of cast iron building in Scotland. Perth used to use the river Tay as its main source of water but as early as 1750 the Town council recommended looking for alternative sources of fresh water due to contamination of the river. By 1820 no solution had been found and Anderson was appointed by the council to find a suitable supply.

It wasn’t until about ten years later that Anderson, unable to come up with a viable supply of fresh water put forward his extraordinary and very radical plan to build an infiltration system. His scheme was probably only accepted because the town recognized his previous success at providing the town with its first gas supply.  Anderson acted as architect, planner, chemist, geologist, physicist and engineer. An Act of Parliament was needed (granted 1829) to authorize the construction of Perths first waterworks. The waterworks was designed as a massive sandstone drum, sandstone being the local stone, surmounted by a cast iron water tank and covered by an iron dome.

This wonderful building has been threatened with demolition several times but it was finally saved from the threat of demolition and restored to its original condition by public concern and the Perth Civic trust in the 1960’s. It was initially used as the tourist information centre, when they were re-housed it was used as a general gallery by Perth council and now, after extensive refurbishment, it is the permanent home of the Fergusson collection and the National Centre for the study and appreciation of his work. The Fergusson gallery was opened 0n Fergusson’s birthday 9th march 1992.

http://www.pkc.gov.uk/Education+and+learning/Museums+and+galleries/Fergusson+Gallery/

Fergusson was born in Leith near Edinburgh March 9th 1874. His parents both came from Pitlochry and Fergusson always considered Perthshire and the highlansda his spiritual home. As a young man he enrolled at Edinburgh to train as a painter but after only a few months he left to study on his own. He set himself a rigid timetable of painting and drawing from life mostly in the open air. His inspiration came from the Glasgow boys, a group of painters based around the Glasgow School of Art and the French naturalist painters.

He visited and studied in France regularly learning to make small quick studies which could later be worked from in a studio. One of the biggest influences during this time was Whistler, especially the work exhibited in Paris at the Memorial exhibition 1905.

He continued to live and work in different parts of France, and in 1913, in Paris, he met his lifelong partner Margaret Morris, a young dancer and painter who was visiting Paris with her own dance company.
During the war years Fergusson and Margaret returned to Britain, she stayed in London and he divided his time between her in London and his family in Edinburgh. Toward the end of the war he was commissioned to make a series of paintings in the naval dockyard Portsmouth.

 At the end of the war Margaret began establishing her various dance schools and Fergusson developed his reputation as one of Scotland’s greatest painters. He died in 1961 and it was Margaret Morris who inherited most of his work. She realized its importance and it was her who, in 1963, established the J D Fergusson Art Foundation to administer the collection.

The collection had, at that time, no permanent home but was loaned out regularly to various other international galleries. Now the collection of over 150 oil paintings, hundreds of watercolours and drawings, 23 sculptures, and around 60 and sketch books are all housed and stored under one roof. The archives, consisting of around 3000 letters, 500 photographs and Fergussons personal library are also part of the permanent collection. I have to say………..what a grand day out that was 

For more information see
http://www.exploreart.co.uk/artistic_styles_details.asp?ArtistID=27&ArtisticStyleID=4

Also, quite a long time ago I did another post on Fergusson, here

http://forgetmenot525.multiply.com/journal/item/62/J._D._Fergusson_Scottish_Colourist
The red sail is one of the paintings Fergusson was commissioned to paint of Portsmouth Dockyard.
John Duncan Fergusson
Oil Painting
Fine Art
In this late painting, Fergusson shows how his association with the Fauvists, affected his work. Fergusson settled in Paris in 1907 and soon after his work underwent radical chqnge. He began to paint using bold colours and simple, flattened shapes. Even in this late work, probably painted after Fergusson settled in Glasgow, the lasting influence of Fauvists can be seen
He is primarily remembered a one of the Scottish Colourists, they were four Scottish artists who worked independently of one another but believed in the same approach to painting. These men were Samuel John Peploe, John Duncan Fergusson, George Leslie Hunter and Francis Boileau Cadell. The group all trained in France and the French influence can be seen in their work. Fergusson, more than the others was influenced in his later work by the Fauvist movement.