Christmas Time in the South of France

During their time in England following the end of the war, Fergusson and Margaret Morris developed a close friendship with Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald. In his biography on C R Mackintosh, Roger Billcliffe suggests that it was Fergusson who encouraged the Mackintosh's to travel to the South of France." In 1923, severely depressed by his treatment, Mackintosh accepted the advice of his friends and left London for a long holiday in the south of France. He was to stay there until the autumn of 1927." This painting perhaps more than any other work illustrates the cross-fertilisation of ideas shared by the two artists. In both its structure and the organic relationship between the villas and the surrounding countryside, there are many common factors to Mackintosh's watercolours produced during the latter part of his life.

The basic elements in Fergusson's painting remain relatively unchanged throughout the 1920s as he continued to explore the effects of limited abstraction in landscape painting. In this work, we can appreciate the effects of partially interwoven rectangular forms of the rooftops of the buildings to create a series of parallel and diagonal planes of visual perspective, which are carefully counter-balanced by the positioning of a single tree in the foreground.