John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961)

Although best known as a painter, Fergusson also made several sculptures, and there are many parallels between his works in two and three dimensions. This bust is named after Eastre, the Saxon goddess of spring and of the rising sun, and the polished brass surface of this work seems to reiterate this. The sculpture was inspired by the artist's wife Margaret Morris, who was a dancer and was involved in a performance called 'Hymn to the Sun'. She represented to Fergusson both the modern woman and someone in touch with primeval forces through the rhythms of dance.

The sculpture's highly-polished surface and cubist-derived forms evoke themes of modernity and the machine age. The sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) owned a cast of Eastre, whose features are echoed in his own depiction of Josephine Baker in 1997 (private collection). The appeal of Eastre to a post-war artist whose own work embraced the machine age reminds us of the avant-garde nature of Fergusson's work.