Marigolds

Bussy was born in Dole, France and studied at the Ecole des beaux-arts de Paris. He held his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1897. In 1901 he visited London and came into contact with members of the Bloomsbury Group, meeting the novelist Dorothy Strachey who became his wife in 1903. They moved to the South of France and hosted visits from both their French and British circles of artistic friends including, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Gran, Roger Fry, Mark Gertler, Virginia Woolf and Henry Matisse. Later they alternated between their South of France home at Roquebrune Cap Martin and England. Working mostly in pastel he draw landscapes and portraits but latterly concentrated on somewhat eccentric animals and birds. Works by him are in many British and French public collections. This work comes from the collection of the artist Charles Maresco Pearce. A pupil of August John, William Orpen and Walter Sickert, Pearce was a member of the New English Art Club and London Group. He lived in Upper Church Street, Chelsea where he assembled a wonderful collection including works by Vuillard, Bonnard, Gauguin, Grant, Sickert and others. The Tate archive holds his manuscript memoirs, which recall the London art scene from 1905 until the start of the First World War.