HENRY FERGUSON (1665-1730)

FIGURES BY ANTIQUE SARCOPHAGUS, AN OBELISK BEYOND
Oil on canvas
42 x 56 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
Private collection, UK;
Anonymous sale, Christie’s, London, 9th February, 1979, lot 10;
Private collection, France
 
 
 
 
Typical of Ferguson's work, the first work in this near-pair is reminiscent of a much larger painting now in the Rijksmuseum of Saint Charles Borromeo in a Fantasy Landscape (SK-A-5006). Elegant figures populate a fantastical and highly classical landscape. The vast majority of the space is usually largely taken up by a classical frieze or stele. In this case the classical stele depicts an elderly man making a sacrifice at a small altar to a small effigy. There is possibly an allusion to Lot and his daughters in the background whose mother is depicted as a salt statue further up the hill, a motif which also appears in the background of the second painting. 
 
 
Henry Ferguson was almost certainly the son of the still life painter William Gouw Ferguson (c.1622-c.1695), who was born in Scotland but left for The Netherlands and was received by the Utrecht Guild of St Luke as a Master in 1648. William worked not only in Utrecht, but in The Hague, Amsterdam and later London. Williams’ oeuvre consists largely of still life pieces of dead game and, as we shall see, there are no landscapes that can be attributed to him. The earliest biographical account of Henry Ferguson can be found in Bainbrigge Buckeridge’s An Essay towards an English School with the Lives and Characters of above 100 Painters (London, 1706): ‘Henry Vergazoon - Was a Dutch Painter of Landskip and Ruins, but chiefly the latter, which he performd exceedingly neatly. His Colouring was very natural, but his Landskip-part commonly too dark and gloomy, appearing as if it was drawn for a Night Piece. He painted sometimes small portraits, which were very curious. He left England some time ago, and died lately in France.’
 
 
Ferguson did indeed leave England for France, settling in Toulouse, but it was his father, William, who died prior to 1706: the confusion of the two artists is one that has dogged both their legacies from that point onwards. The next record of this elusive international painter comes in George Vertues’ writings (published between c.1710-1756), where he remarked on two paintings in an auction of 1724/25: ‘…two pictures 3/4 of Basso Rilevos antique Stones. Very carefully & well painted the light thrown into ye pictures very surprisingly these done by Ferguson a Scot when in Italy…He lived several years abroad some part in France came to England and lived & dyd here…’ Again, Vertue confuses the biographies of father and Son, as William is not known to have visited Italy, but Henry very likely did so. For almost two centuries, the remarkably idiosyncratic work of Henry continued to be attributed on the whole to his father, William, very quickly obscuring Henry's legacy almost altogether. 
 
 
That the spelling of his surname jumped around, as was fairly common prior to the late 19th century, did nothing to help: the earliest record for Ferguson on the Getty Provenance Index comes from 1686 - 'Twee ditos stillevens van Vergeson', owned by Hendrik Thisz. Coster & Catarina van Ravesteijn of the Princegragt, Amsterdam - while the earliest auction record is from as early as that same year, 'A Little Piece of Stone-work', sold in November of 1686. [1]
 
On the continent, collectors and scholars in the Languedoc were aware of a Ferguson who had painted landscapes with ruins and had worked in Toulouse, with works by his hand in numerous collections in the region; but although Henry ‘Vergazon’ (sometimes ‘Vergazoon’) continued to be listed in comprehensive encyclopaedias of artists’ lives, not a single scholar from France or anywhere else disentangled Henry and his landscapes from William and his still lives, perhaps because the surname used for the former was almost always the Dutch spelling, while William’s was the Anglicised spelling, meaning that they were at opposite ends of the alphabet. 
 
Despite these longstanding mistakes, Henry Ferguson’s paintings found their way into English collections (including Ham House, Althorp, Belton House and Rushbrooke Hall among others) throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The example in the Spencer family collection was documented as ‘A Monument by Ferguson of Lyon’, a tantalising reference to what we now know to be Ferguson’s collaboration with the Dutch painter Adriaen van der Kabel (1631-1705) [2], who settled in Lyons in the latter part of his career after spending many years in Italy. Other artists said to have painted the staffage for Ferguson on at least one occasion were the great Anglo-Dutch sporting artist, Jan Wyck (1652-1702) [3], the expat Dutch painter Willem van Mieris (1662-1747) [4]and an unknown painter by the name of Berard. 
 
 
Martin Eidelberg has identified numerous paintings by Ferguson in British collections, many of which were produced while the artist still lived in Britain, several which depart from the subjects seen in our pair of landscapes, and are more strictly genre scenes in the same manner as those of the Bamboccianti. Adding to this further strand of the painter’s artistic activity, Professor Eidelberg has also noted that Ferguson was once associated with Godfrey Kneller, a connection that should not be overlooked: Horace Walpole wrote, in his life of Kneller, that ‘Henry Vergazon, a Dutch painter of ruins and landscapes, with which he sometimes was called to adorn the backgrounds of Kneller’s pictures, though his coloring was reckoned too dark. He painted a few small portraits and died in France.’