'For this and our next issue, we are turning the spotlight on our sponsors, British Art Fair, to see what is in store at the next fair at the end of September. Some of the content is already on the website, but here are a few highlights which have not yet been promoted, which we believe to be of significant interest. What becomes apparent is that exhibitors this year are creating more mini exhibitions within their stands, with a focus on individuals or groups that could add an educational element to what is fundamentally a commercial endeavour. An endeavour that, as always, balances the tried and tested (Hockney, Hepworth, Moore…) with the forgotten and undervalued (see Inshaw, Warburton, Bell below).'
Simon Bussy (1870-1954), African Sunbird and Sugar Bird, 1951, oil on canvas, 27.4 × 21.6cm. £35,000
Although born in France, Simon Bussy lays claim to a certain Britishness by virtue of his marriage in 1903 to Dorothy Strachey, the sister of the historian Lytton Strachey, through whom he associated with the artists and writers of the Bloomsbury Group – Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Mark Gertler.
As an artist, he is best known for his closely observed and characterful pastels of animals which he developed from around 1912 during visits to London Zoo. “Each [work]”, he wrote, “is an invention, a poetic composition, not only decorative…the animals I paint and the foliage which surrounds them…in my opinion there is no element that has not been the object of patient observation; my numerous studies in pastel, created with the paintings in mind, proves it. My animals, birds and reptiles have nothing trivial; they are actual portraits in which I desire that the resemblance emerges from the incidental with always further clarity, precision and purity.”
The London Zoo opened a special bird viewing area in 1927 called the Blackburn Pavilion or the Bird House. Bussy would have found both birds depicted here in the Bird House, which specialised in exotic birds from Africa. It was also the Bird House which inspired a young David Attenborough to go on expeditions to West Africa shortly after this picture was painted to bring more nectar-feeding birds back to England for study. Around this time, Bussy painted Conversation Piece; Two Toucans (1926-30), with a similar backdrop to the present painting. Originally owned by the historian John Strachey, Conversation Piece was sold at Sotheby’s this year for a quadruple estimate of £20,000. Bussy’s auction record appears to be $66,000 in Switzerland in 2021 for a pair of herons, once owned by the poet André Gide, who hung his bedroom full of Bussy pastels.
