Born in Leith, Scotland in 1874, John Duncan Fergusson paid his first visit to Paris in 1898, briefly attending the Académie Colarossi and finding in 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’. France indeed took a hold on Fergusson and of all the Scottish Colourists, he was to spend the most time in the country. As has been written, ‘without their French counterparts and experience, none of the Scottish Colourists would have developed their art as we know it...and for Fergusson, living in France far longer than any of the others, it became the crux of his existence.’ (Philip Long and Elizabeth Cumming, The Scottish Colourists 1900-1930, Edinburgh, 2000, pp. 54-55).

From 1904 to 1906 he travelled to Paris and the northern coast each summer with Samuel Peploe; then in the spring of 1907 he took the decisive step to lease a studio at 18 boulevard Edgar Quinet. In the autumn, he exhibited for the first time at the Salon d’Automne and was made a sociétaire two years later. Dating to 1907, the present work is one of his first paintings from this influential chapter in Fergusson’s life. Located within the city’s Latin Quarter, the narrow and bustling street of rue St Jacques was a fifteen minutes’ walk across the Luxembourg Gardens from boulevard Edgar Quinet, and the painting displays the increasing impact of the post-Impressionists and Fauves upon his technique.

Executed on a portable 14 x 10 inch board, it is painted en plein air with loaded paint, applied swiftly and energetically. Long vertical brushstrokes denote the buildings while shorter touches form the architectural details and the figures that pass through. Above and behind, the sky fills the upper centre in freely flowing greys, swept on with a wide brush, and crossed near the horizon by a stripe of blue. Flashes of red also serve to draw the eye down the boulevard. In its confident execution, here was Fergusson successfully staking his claim amongst the avant-garde circles of Paris. ‘I had been accepted by the people I had most respect for. As an artist nothing could be more important.’ (Margaret Morris, The Art Of J.D Fergusson, 1974, P. 54). A smaller variation of the present work from the same year depicting Rue St Jacques is in the National Galleries of Scotland on long-term loan.

Fifty years later, in 1957, the Annan Gallery in Glasgow staged a retrospective for Fergusson. It was the only complete view of his life’s work to be seen in his lifetime, many paintings drawn from his private collection in his Glasgow residence, 4 Clouston Street, a corner flat overlooking the Botanic Gardens in which he and Margaret Morris had lived since their return from Antibes in September 1939. The present works still bears a 4 Clouston address label on the reverse; at his death in 1961, his wife Margaret Morris was the sole heir to his estate to whom this painting passed. At the opening of Fergusson’s retrospective in May 1957, The Scotsman in praise called Fergusson ‘the Scottish doyen of modern art’ (The Scotsman, 7 May 1957). Rue St Jacques stands as witness to that.