The Stafford Gallery

Although he was never one of its formal constituents, Douglas Fox Pitt was part of the circle around the Camden Town Group. When they disbanded and reconvened as the more radical London Group in 1913 – containing the advanced modern elements of David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein and the vorticists – Fox Pitt became a founder member. His own art nevertheless followed the progressive but still conservative figurative style established by the Camden Town painters, most notably adopting their bright, post-impressionist palette. Fox Pitt’s pictures of street scenes and city landscapes to some degree also recall Camden Town Group subject matter. A man of independent means, he worked generally in watercolour, and his pictures became known through a series of London exhibitions of scenes painted on foreign travels in India, Morocco and elsewhere. Closer to home, views of Brighton formed the most common subject in his art.

This watercolour of the Stafford Gallery, however, is a rare document of an early exhibition by the Scottish Colourist J.D. Fergusson at a London venue known for its displays of avant-garde art around 1912. The Stafford Gallery was a short-lived centre for the showing of modern French art. It held one of the first exhibitions of Paul Gauguin’s paintings in 1911, and this was commemorated by Spencer Gore in his well-known painting Gauguins and Connoisseurs 1911 (fig.1). Other shows included an exhibition of Pablo Picasso drawings in 1912, and early London exhibitions of Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne.

Fox Pitt’s watercolour illustrates a group of paintings from the Exhibition of Pictures by J.D. Fergusson at the gallery from 9 March 1912. The central picture in the watercolour is number two in the catalogue, La Dame aux Oranges c.1908–9 (whereabouts unknown)1, which may depict Fergusson’s friend, the American artist Anne Estelle Rice (1879–1959);2 to its right is number three, Le Manteau Chinois 1909 (Fergusson Gallery, Perth);3 and on the left is number one, The Red Shawl 1908 (University of Stirling).4 Interestingly, in the exhibition catalogue it states the prices for these three paintings: The Red Shawl is £500, La Dame aux Oranges is £300, and Le Manteau Chinois is £500. This is far more than any Camden Town Group painter ever charged for one of their pictures. If the numbering in the catalogue follows the exhibition, the obscured paintings on the right of the watercolour may be numbers four to seven: Le Valeur de la Science (£200), Une Rue, Royan (£50), The Spanish Shawl (£200) and Le Compotier (£40). The art critic Frank Rutter later said of the central painting: ‘A wealth of accessories in La Dame aux Oranges orchestrated the curves and contours peculiar to the sitter into a rhythmic fugue of line and colour’.5