EDINBURGH.- A major painting by the Scottish Colourist, John Duncan Fergusson, is one of the highlights of the sale of Bonhams' Colourists and other Scottish painters in Edinburgh on the evening of Wednesday 31 August.

The work, ‘At the Milliner’s Paris’, depicts some of the dressmaking assistants Fergusson met at the louche Cafe d’Harcourt in the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank in Paris where they would gather after work and mingle with students from the nearby Sorbonne University. It was a favourite haunt of Fergusson’s when he was living and working in Paris before the First World War and based in a studio in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. (The cafe continued as a student meeting place until the Nazi invasion in 1940 when it was turned into a German run bookshop. It is now a branch of Gap).

Edinburgh born Fergusson was the most travelled of the four Scottish Colourists (the other three being Peploe, Cadell and Hunter) and lived in France for long spells before 1914 and between the two world wars. Largely self taught - he trained for a while as a naval surgeon before turning to painting - his work reflects a wide range of influences from Manet and Monet to Matisse and Whistler. Considered the most stylistically adventurous of the Colourists, his work now commands high prices and ‘At the Milliner’s Paris’ is estimated at £180,000-250,000.

Fergusson returned to Scotland in 1939 and settled in Glasgow where he lived until his death in 1961.