From Leith to Paris with love
The muse of renowned Scottish Colourist JD Fergusson is stepping out of his canvas and into the limelight in her own right
It is a story of art and love. An affaire de coeur that burned for six years leading to a lifelong friendship. A story of Bohemian freedom of expression, two talents honing their skills and achieving success.
It is a story that played out in Paris when the French Capital was also the artistic centre of the world, when modern art as we know it was being pioneered by artists including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. There Leith-born painter John Duncan Fergusson travelled to live with American Anne Estelle Rice, whom he had met at the art colony of Etaples in northern France a short time earlier.
Only one of the lovers has enjoyed enduring success. Until recently, the work of the other has been largely forgotten. This week in a sale of art at the esteemed Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull A Bowl of Fruit – painted by Rice in Paris in 1911 – sold for £112,700, around three times its pre-sale mid-estimate.
Fergusson, of course, was a leading figure in the Scottish Colourist movement. He went on to become one of Scotland’s greatest painters and his works have been auctioned for up to £1 million - so far. Rice featured in much of his work as a strikingly beautiful model, his muse, posing for some of his most famous paintings, including a portrait of her from 1908 now in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland. “Art,” he said, “should be the expression of joy.”
But she was much more than his model. As well as her own artistic prowess, she was a successful, sophisticated professional woman, who travelled abroad and supported herself at a time when doing so was far from common.
A footnote in history
Rice’s career continued after the couple parted, but interest in her work faded gradually after she left Paris to return to the UK at the outbreak of the First World War. She became, according to Scottish art expert Alice Strang, “a footnote in history”.
Lyon & Turnbull’s Senior Specialist in Scottish Art explained: “Rice is known through Fergusson’s many glorious portraits of his confident and beautiful partner. What is less well-known is that she was, arguably, as important an artist as he was in the heyday of modern art in Paris before 1914.
"A Bowl of Fruit dates from the peak period in her career and is a wonderful and rare example of her work at its best. The paintings appearance on the market has seen a moment of excitement at a time when the achievements of women artists are being re-evaluated.
“The beautiful painting is a highly confident, sensually charged and boldly coloured image of female empowerment.”
Rice was held in as high esteem by peers in the art world as Fergusson during their years together from 1907 to 1913. Her work was shown in exhibitions in London, Cologne, Budapest and Paris. That included those of the cutting-edge Salon d’Automne, to which she was elected a Sociétaire (member) by peers in 1910 in recognition of her contribution to the modern movement.
Together with Fergusson, Rice became a key figure in the cutting-edge Rhythm group of Anglo-American artists. Right up until they parted, they were very much a pairing of equals.
Meeting Rice in Etaples had set Fergusson’s mind on a move to Paris in 1907. Rice already lived and worked there, having rekindled her love of painting. Fergusson had begun to feel stifled by the conservative constraints of Scotland’s art scene in the early 20th century. He described Paris as “a place of freedom” and also as “a centre of light.”
Rice had been living in Paris for two years, having been sent there to illustrate the latest fashions and scenes of the city’s life for the influential Philadelphian daily newspaper, The North American.
A life devoted to women
Strang added: “Meeting her was the tipping point for Fergusson. He had been considering a move to Paris, and when he met her he made the decision. It was to have a profound effect on both of their careers.
“Paris was the centre of the artistic world, and it must have been an incredibly exciting place to be at that time. She became not only his lover, but his colleague, and also his beautiful muse. She was a very stylish and striking woman.”
Guy Peploe is a renowned authority on the Scottish Colourists including Fergusson and his own grandfather, S J Peploe, a celebrated contemporary and close friend of Fergusson. The two men spent many summers painting together in France.
In an article for the Scottish Gallery in 2020, Guy Peploe described Fergusson’s thousands of sketches as proof of “a life devoted to women.” He added: “They are not passive, the gaze is not averted; instead they are celebrated as equals, potential is unbounded and the artist’s respect for his subject is palpable.”
Fergusson’s relationship with Anne Estelle Rice came to an end after he met dance pioneer, Margaret Morris, in 1913. She was in Paris with her troupe and visited Fergusson at his studio in Montparnasse. He went on to spend the rest of his life with Morris. At the outbreak of The Great War they returned to the UK to Glasgow where he continued to work and produce both paintings and sculptures.
Morris later said of Fergusson: ‘He settled in Paris, having sold all his possessions in Scotland except the sofa, made to his design – this, he had sent to Paris, where he could always sleep on it before he got a bed… Fergusson fully appreciated what a wonderful period of modern art he had dropped into in Paris.”
Rice also returned to Britain, and married art and theatre critic O. Raymond Drey. The couple lived in south-west England with their son, with Rice continuing to paint. Her career never equalled her pre-World War One successes.
One of her paintings from that period, of the famous New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield in a red dress, has gained great acclaim. At the time of painting, Mansfield had already been diagnosed with the tuberculosis, which was to take her life a few years later.
In a letter to her husband, Mansfield expressed pleasure in the painting: “Anne came early and began the great painting – me in that red (sic) brick red frock with flowers everywhere. It’s awfully interesting even now.”
Rice visited her on an almost daily basis and appears regularly in Mansfield’s letters and notebooks. The two were to remain close friends.
Exactly 150 years after he was born in Leith, Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson remains a celebrated artist, with his work fetching increasingly high-figure sums. Earlier this year, another of his paintings sold for £250,000 at Lyon & Turnbull. Now, 65 years after her death, his once equally famous fellow artist and model Anne Estelle Rice, is returning to claim her share of the limelight.