Anne Estelle Rice in Paris, 1905-10 (oil on board)

"Anne Estelle Rice in Paris" (Closerie des Lilas); Fergusson spent many years in France before the Second World War. He first met the American artist Anne Estelle Rice in Paris in 1904, and worked alongside her until 1914. Set in fashionable Montparnasse, this portrait includes the café 'Closerie des Lilas' in the background, a reminder of the artist's taste for Parisian café society. Small enough to have been executed en plein air, this is Fergusson's first essay in Fauve portraiture. (Fauve, or wild beast, was the name given c.1900 to the painters Derain and Matisse because of their untamed use of colour.)