Boulevard Edgar Quinet by John Duncan Fergusson, £70,000 at Lyon & Turnbull.
The top end of the Scottish art market continued its good run at Edinburgh saleroom Lyon & Turnbull (26/25/20% buyer’s premium) where the firm’s latest dedicated offering pulled in £1.97m - its second-highest total in the category to date.
Only the saleroom’s equivalent summer auction in 2016 built around two significant offerings of Scottish Colourist paintings - the Wood and Robertson collections - totalled more at £2.1m.
“In this instance we didn’t have a collection per se, and that was what was particularly pleasing about the result,” said Nick Curnow, head of fine art at Lyon & Turnbull.
Fergusson and Colourists
As expected, demand at the 190-lot sale on June 6 centred on a strong selection of works by the Colourists, the progressive quartet of early 20th century painters who are among the most celebrated names in modern Scottish art.
The section, which comfortably contributed over half the sale total, may not have featured a significant single-owner collection but it included no fewer than 17 works by John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961), the Colourist with perhaps the most international reputation.
Put together to mark the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth, the group represented a cross-section of his output: finished oils from various dates in the first decades of the 20th century and works on paper, including drawings, watercolours and one of Fergusson’s sketchbooks. Bidders absorbed all of it, spending just shy of £500,000 (with premium), with many of the higher priced lots going to private collectors.
Generating stiff competition was a small 14 x 10½in (36 x 27cm) oil on board depicting Boulevard Edgar Quinet, one of a series of vibrant street scenes painted shortly after Fergusson arrived in the French capital.
He executed the work with a “confident command of modernist technique” in 1909 - the year he exhibited at the Venice Biennale for the first time.
Described by Curnow as a “lovely fresh little painting” that encapsulated “the Colourists in Paris in those early years”, it was taken to £70,000 against a £40,000-60,000 estimate.
Rose in the Hair by John Duncan Fergusson, £195,000 at Lyon & Turnbull.
The financial highlight was another work from Fergusson’s French period: a 1908 portrait titled Rose in the Hair thought to depict either his lover and fellow artist Anne Estelle Rice, the American writer Elizabeth Dryden, or the haute couture business-owner Yvonne de Kerstratt.
The auction house described the 2ft 1in x 21in (64 x 53cm) oil on board as a “tour de force example” of how the artist’s practice flourished following his move from Edinburgh to Paris in 1907 trading the “controlled, realist technique” of his Edwardian portraits in Edinburgh for “bold, gestural and suggestive brushstrokes”.
Fergusson clearly prized the work; he kept it all his life and selected it for inclusion in solo exhibitions of his work in 1949 (when it was priced at £100) and 1950.
It came to the Edinburgh saleroom through a vendor whose father had acquired the painting from the artist’s wife, Margaret Morris.
An appealing picture all round, it was taken to £195,000, against a £100,000-150,000 guide, making it one of the more expensive Fergusson portraits sold at auction.
Peploe top pick
Still Life with Fruit and Flowers by Samuel Peploe, £340,000 at Lyon & Turnbull.
Samuel Peploe (1871-1935), the most successful - critically and commercially - of the four Colourists, often tops major Scottish art sales, and this auction was no exception.
His Still Life with Fruit and Flowers was the financial star here, painted in the period shortly after the end of the First World War when the artist was embarking on a new series of brightly coloured flower paintings and working closely with his friend and fellow Colourist, Francis Cadell.
The 18 x 16in (46 x 41cm) oil on canvas, which was selected for the memorial exhibition of Peploe’s work mounted at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow in 1937, had not been offered at auction before.
The picture’s striking lilac background, against which the artist had painted a jug of red and yellow flowers, crockery and three apples, was highly unusual for a Peploe - and “might have been a bit strong for some people’s tastes,” said Curnow.
According to the auction house, the colour is thought to have been the one Cadell used on the first floor of his Edinburgh home at Ainslie Place and is possibly unique in Peploe’s oeuvre.
Against an enticing £200,000-300,000 guide, it attracted bids from three private collectors before it sold for £340,000 to an international buyer.
“We weren’t under pressure as far as the estimate was so concerned so I would have been slightly disappointed if it hadn’t made somewhere near what it made,” said Curnow.
Glasgow Boy with good provenance
A Japanese Tea Garden by Edward Atkinson Hornel, £80,000 at Lyon & Turnbull.
Arguably the rarest lot in the sale came from a Glasgow Boy rather than a Colourist: the 24 x 16in (61 x 41cm) oil on canvas A Japanese Tea Garden by Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864-1933).
Quite different from the painter’s somewhat formulaic later works depicting young girls in woodland landscapes, the oil depicting geishas at a tea ceremony was produced during the painter’s landmark trip to Japan in 1893-94 with friend and fellow Glasgow Boy George Henry.
Hornel is said to have revelled in the customs, clothing and decorative schemes that he witnessed but also used photography - pictures he took himself or bought from commercial photographers - to inform his imagery. The 44 Japanese works he exhibited at Alexander Reid’s gallery La Société des Beaux-Arts in Glasgow in 1895 met a triumphant reception with all but one sold.
“These pictures just don’t crop up,” said Curnow. “In many ways a Colourist is easier to acquire than a Japanese Horner of this quality.”
The painting boasted a fine provenance too. It was consigned by direct descent from the leading Glaswegian patron of the arts William Davidson (1861-1945) and had not been seen in public since it was shown in the Scottish Arts Council’s touring exhibition Mr Henry and Mr Hornel visit Japan of 1978-79.
Estimated at £30,000-50,000, this work drew interest from “at least half a dozen people” before it was knocked down to a private buyer at £80,000. The sum is the second highest at auction behind the painter’s vast work, Easter Eggs, which made £85,000 in the same rooms in 2006.
