Colourist's lover dances out of the shadows

They will prove her as an overlooked talent whose artistic skills matched those of Fergusson – thanks partly to his teaching – and the other Scottish Colourist painters, researchers said.

Thousands of items, from childhood drawings, photographs and letters to striking oil paintings, collected by the dance organisation that Morris founded, have been gifted to the Fergusson Gallery in Perth. Highlights are to be shown in two exhibitions this year.

"Some people might know Margaret Morris as a dancer, but not as an artist," said Jenny Kinnear, an art officer for the gallery.

"She very much played down her artistic side, the painting and things, because she felt she was in a relationship and there wasn't room for two painters."

Born in London in 1891, Morris began performing at the age of three. Trained in ballet, she pioneered her own dance and movement training system, and opened schools in the UK and France.

The Margaret Morris Movement maintains a worldwide teaching network to this day.

In 1913, Morris took a dance troupe to Paris and met the Edinburgh-born artist John Duncan Fergusson.

He is now known as one of the four Scottish Colourist painters, whose brightly coloured, Impressionistic works command hundreds of thousands of pounds at auction.

It was an artistic pairing that would last for nearly 50 years, though the couple defied convention and never married.

However, she changed her name to his by deed poll.

"At that first meeting, he promised to teach me to paint – and he did. He said he would come and see me dance and interest his friends – and he did," she wrote later.

Fergusson and Morris lived in London and Paris, and moved back to Glasgow in 1939 on the outbreak of war, where Morris formed the Celtic Ballet Club, a professional dance company. They remained together until his death in 1961. She died in Glasgow in 1980.

Jim Hastie, director of the current Margaret Morris Movement, oversaw the gift of a collection first gathered by Morris's mother. "I wanted Margaret's archive to go beside his. I can't believe this is actually happening," he said.

There are at least 50 pictures in the Morris Movement collection, said Ms Kinnear, including stunning Colourist-style paintings of dancers. "This is really very good," Fergusson wrote on the back of one.

But in a book of designs for her production of Snow White, he was more critical, writing underneath one sketch: "As a drawing, not very good."

The Morris collection includes early letters home to her mother from Paris – coyly sidestepping the fact that she was living alone in a studio as an unmarried young woman.

There are also letters from Fergusson to Morris with little sketches among ideas for choreography and designs.

The collection includes still-life pictures and portraits by Morris, costume designs and costumes from the First World War period. One is a ballet cloak that was designed and hand-painted for her by Fergusson.

"It shows them right at the beginning of the career, collaborating and supporting on projects together," said Ms Kinnear, adding: "She's been overlooked as an artist, which is a bit of a shame."

PROFILE: Sexual libertine, gifted artist – and possibly The Woman Colourist

MARGARET Morris was a doughty lady. She and her lifelong partner, JD Fergusson, belonged to very liberated circles before the First World War. If DH Lawrence had a thing about sex, he was not alone. Fergusson and Morris were into nude sunbathing, free love and other "advanced ideas". That is probably why they never married but lived in what has since become the modern style as partners. They needed their freedom. Certainly he did. Pictures of her dance troupe and the students she taught at summer schools in the South of France don't have many men in

them. Morris's own style as a painter is easily confused with Fergusson's, but she was gifted nonetheless. Diaghelev's Ballets Russes was a major influence on Fergusson in Paris. This is perhaps where Margaret Morris's inspiration originated. Her dance style, her choreography, stage sets and costume designs developed naturally from her art and all combine brilliant colour and movement.

Certainly she was into colour in a way that might qualify her as the woman Colourist. Fergusson painted and drew her constantly, while she returned the complement by writing JD Fergusson: a biased biography. Charles Rennie Mackintosh was also a close friend of the couple. His design for a theatre for Margaret to be built in London is a great lost opportunity.

Duncan MacMillan