The summer of 1910 at Royan was the point at which the group, later called the Scottish Colourists, crossed from late Impressionism into Fauvism. The present work, painted on the adjacent beach at Saint-Palais-sur-Mer, is a reflection of that transition. Fergusson had travelled to Royan from his Paris studio with the American painter and his companion, Anne Estelle Rice. There he joined his compatriot Samuel Peploe who, newly married, had taken rooms in Royan for the season. On the curving beach at Saint-Palais Fergusson and Peploe set up their small boards side by side and reset the terms of their painting. 

Since Fergusson’s arrival in Paris, he had worked with a painting-box of his own devising: a hinged case with interior grooves holding several primed boards no larger than a postcard, the lid serving as a palette, designed to permit the alla prima sketch outdoors without the paraphernalia of the studio. The boards were bought from the Paris American Art Co. on the rue Bonaparte, a supplier Peploe shared. The present work, oil on canvas laid on board, is one of those sheets: painted in a single session, direct, without correction, the weave of the canvas still reading through the thinner passages of the beach. 

Fergusson’s first sustained contact with modern French painting had begun a decade and a half earlier. He made his first trip to Paris in 1898, studied briefly at the Académie Colarossi in the rue de la Grande-Chaumière, and took from the Caillebotte bequest at the Musée du Luxembourg the conviction, as he later put it, that ‘something new had started there and I was very much intrigued’. By 1907 the trip had become a residence. He took a Montparnasse studio, was elected a sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne, and found, as he wrote in the memoir his partner Margaret Morris reprinted in 1974, ‘what the French call an “Ambiance”; an atmosphere which was not only agreeable and suitable to work in, but in which it was impossible not to work’ (M. Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson, Glasgow, 1974, p. 50). Royan fell within this first Paris phase, and offers a working record of how Fergusson’s Parisian discoveries were being applied, at speed and at small scale, to a wholly vernacular subject.

In Fergusson’s earlier bathing subjects from circa 1906 at Paris-Plage, Dieppe and Étaples, for example Grey Day, Paris Plage (Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum), the works have the tonal silveriness of Manet and the fluid touch of Whistler; figures are distinguished from their surroundings by modelling rather than by contour. By contrast, in works such as the present, forms are bound by a warm black outline derived from Matisse and Derain at Collioure; local colour is laid on in strokes that no longer aspire to tonal description; shadow is recorded in violet and viridian rather than in grey, while the beach itself is a series of fragmented patchwork. The figures are read as silhouettes, the parasols as flat discs of saturated red, and the architecture of the huts is reduced to coloured planes within a firm contour. This is what it looks like when a painter who has spent three years among the Fauves begins to paint what he sees in their terms.

The picture remained in the artist’s hands until his death in 1961 and passed to Margaret Morris (1891-1980), an important modern dancer and teacher who became his companion from 1913 and later his wife, and who served as executor of his estate. The long retention is itself telling: Fergusson and Morris kept few of the small French-period panels, and those they kept tended to be the ones each considered a working summary of a season. Morris gifted the work to a private collector before compiling her 1974 monograph. Over a century on from its execution, this modernist painting tells the story of Fergusson’s pioneering career within the heart of avant-garde developments in France and Britain at the turn of the 20th century.