At the turn of the twentieth century, Sir John Lavery’s reputation was global, with major works in institutional and private collections throughout Europe, as well as North and South America.

Lavery’s beginnings were, however, inauspicious. Born in Belfast and an orphan at the age of three, he spent the first ten years of his life on his uncle’s farm before being sent to a relative in Ayrshire to work in a shop. As a boy he was fascinated by cartoons drawn by a visiting commercial traveller and realised that he too had skills that blossomed when he took early morning classes at Glasgow School of Art. Within a few years, while working at the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing, he embraced French Naturalism and Impressionism. Awarded a gold medal at the Paris Salon for The Tennis Party (1885, Aberdeen Art Gallery) he was a leading member of the Glasgow Boys and was instrumental in forming an International Society to display modern European and American art in London. A juror at the Venice Biennale, Lavery was awarded a solo exhibition of over 50 canvases in Venice in 1910 and, with his depiction of the Royal Family group in 1913 (National Portrait Gallery), and service as a war artist, a knighthood followed in 1918. An inveterate traveller with a house in Tangier, he had three successful seasons in New York in the 1920s, before two eventful expeditions to California around his eightieth birthday. 

Lavery in London

Although he lived in the city for over forty years, Lavery’s London landscapes are relatively rare. Apart from special occasions such as royal processions and a few scenes of Hyde Park, when it came to the river, it was upper reaches of the Thames at Taplow, Henley and Sutton Courtenay that claimed his attention. Possibly feeling them the obvious preserve of Whistler, Monet and their respective followers the embankments of Chelsea and Westminster were avoided completely. There are three important exceptions: the present canvas, looking across the river from the Isle of Dogs to Greenwich Pier and the Royal Hospital, and two other works depicting the pool of London in 1921 from roughly the same location.

In the present instance it may be purely coincidental that Lavery adopts a classic Whistler compositional layout, placing his sailboat on the right and the domes of the Royal Hospital on the distant bank on the left. His use of subtle warm and cool greys would certainly have been approved by his American mentor. Less tentative than Whistler, Lavery’s riverbank viewpoint is lower, and his control of light, space, atmosphere and reflections is more luminous. In swiftly noted brushstrokes, river craft are observed passing the famous landmark in both directions, while due prominence is given to his main motif - a typical oyster smack, with topsail on the main mast and small mizzen to the rear. Sails, although white cotton, took on their characteristic red ochre when proofed. A steam tug pulling empty barges and heading towards Tilbury completes the ensemble.

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, Lavery immediately returned to London from his Irish holiday to find the city in uproar. He sketched the newly established army camp in The Green Park, December 1914 (Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth) and the Arrival of the Wounded at London Hospital, 1915 (Dundee Museums), while ceaselessly agitating for artists to be commissioned as recorders of the conflict. While recovery from a taxi crash in Park Lane during the summer of 1915, restricted his activities, by the following spring, Crystal Palace was requisitioned as a training base for the Royal Naval Division (as depicted in the present work).

Constructed in Hyde Park, for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the glass and iron structure was disassembled and rebuilt at Sydenham Hill in South London after the closure of the exhibition where life-size plaster dinosaurs ‘pleasingly infested the gardens’ - the equivalent of a modern theme park. A popular attraction for Londoners it was painted by the French Impressionist, Camille Pissarro in 1871. The Crystal Palace then ‘fell on evil days and was only saved (from demolition) by a public subscription in 1913’, just before the outbreak of war.

The present work is likely to have been painted on Lavery’s first visit to Sydenham Hill in the summer of 1916 when an overcast day resulted in rain. The painter returned to the site in 1917, when he had secured an Admiralty Pass as an Official War Artist to paint the training of the Naval Volunteer Reserve.

The House of Commons

Following the success of his painting of The Ratification of the Irish Treaty in the House of Lords, December 1921, (Glasgow Museums), Lavery was encouraged to perform the same task for the lower house. The opportunity did not occur, however, until the General Election of 1924 returned the first Labour government, when,

‘... all objections were overcome and I was allowed to take my pochade box into the Distinguished Visitors’ enclosure, where I was able to paint in comfort without my presence being known ... it turned out a much easier problem than I had anticipated. Since each member had his allotted seat, which he retained long enough to feel at home there, I had plenty of opportunities of observing and choosing his favourite position. If I did not catch it at once I could feel that there would be other times when he could take up the pose again, which in many cases was quite unconscious’ (John Lavery, The Life of a Painter, 1940 (Cassel), pp. 186-7).

An acute observer, Lavery’s long experience had taught him that the way individuals move - sit or stand - was just as unique as the construction of their faces. His eye was honed to observe such traits. That having been said, the painting of The House of Commons was not without difficulty. A standing figure in back view, entering the chamber, that he later judged to be detracting from the Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, making his opening speech at the Dispatch Box, was removed around the time of the work’s exhibition at the Royal Academy. (This figure appears in early illustrations of the Glasgow painting; see Royal Academy Illustrated 1924, Walter Judd Ltd, 1924, p. 47. See also Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, Atelier Books, Edinburgh, 2010, pp. 164-5)

Three other ‘pochade’ studies are known - one in the National Gallery of Scotland, one in the Beverbrook Art Gallery, New Brunswick, and the third in a private collection.

The Silver Screen

After the death of his beloved daughter, Eileen, in July 1935, Lavery’s granddaughter, Ann Forbes-Sempill came to stay with him in 5 Cromwell Place. The fifteen-year-old’s chatter, and that of her friends, centred around the latest Hollywood cinema releases. Such was his fascination with this fan-talk, that the painter, now in his eightieth year, resolved to visit the celebrated studios and experience moviemaking at first hand. He arrived at MGM lots in January 1936 when shooting was underway on the famous balcony scene from Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. In the YouTube clip Howard hides by a flight of steps and then creeps along the poolside path to hear Juliet deliver the immortal line - ‘... wherefore art thou Romeo...’.

Shooting, Lavery tells us, was chaotic, with random shouts of ‘lights off!’, ‘lights on!’ and ‘Cut! Cut!’ (John Lavery, The Life of a Painter, 1940 (Cassel), p. 240). While working in such an environment was impossible for one in his eightieth year, in the present sketch he gives a good account of the scene, that in the film lasts less than a minute, and is shot in darkness, evoking moonlight. A still from the sequence attests to the fact that the accuracy of the painter’s eye, despite the prevailing conditions, had not left him.

Lavery’s Portraits

Having secured a position as a photographer’s ‘retoucher’, in his early twenties Lavery was able to attend classes for working men at the Haldane Academy, the extramural section of Glasgow School of Art. These were nevertheless years of extreme hardship for a young artist who had no family support. The city bank failed in 1878 and signs of poverty were everywhere. With the goal of honing his talent, opportunities arose as much in exhibitions in Paisley, Dumbarton, Kirkcaldy and other outlying towns as in Glasgow, although it was in the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts with Pious Reflections, 1879 (Private Collection) that he began to find patrons.

As his work improved, with many small canvases he hoped to discover ‘the taste of the public’ - an objective shared with his great forebear Sir David Wilkie. Beauty Lies in Many Eyes typifies Lavery’s early work, and even though an exhibition record for it cannot be found, it edges towards greater sophistication than other very early figure studies such as Her First Disappointment and Mistress Anne Page (both private collections). This was an age when most artists and patrons were male, and ‘beauty’ resided in women; it was the by-product of the common consensus rather than the single ‘eye of the beholder’. A turn of the head, a ‘brightening glance’ was, for the artist its mercurial source. Lavery’s long engagement with ‘fair women’ can be said to have begun in works like this. (Lavery’s solo exhibitions in Lawrie’s gallery in Glasgow in 1893 and 1895 were titled ‘Fair Women’ – a phrase borrowed from Tennyson and adopted for group exhibitions in London in 1894 and during the Edwardian period). 

At the end of 1881, along with fellow students, Alfred East and William Kennedy, Lavery travelled to Paris to register at the popular atelier Julian in the Passage des Panoramas. While life studies were an end in themselves for his contemporaries, he, nevertheless, was obliged to convert them into fictional heroines or exotic figures, to make them saleable and support his studies. Before leaving, he exhibited seven small works at the Paisley Art Institute, four of which were sold. One of the three unsold canvases was Summer, and it appears from the inscription on the reverse in the artist’s hand that this was painted over, to become His Portrait, the present work, a head study of a respectable young woman gazing at the miniature of a loved one.

His Portrait demonstrates Lavery’s growing confidence when he returned briefly to Scotland during his studies in France and observed the green shoots of economic revival. This was evident in more fashionable and flamboyant dresses and in the Daniel Cottier or William Morris-style interior decoration of ‘artistic homes’. These were drawn together in an ambitious larger canvas entitled, After the Dance, shown at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1883. Like the present study, this adopts a flat backdrop using the same wallpaper and embossed or stencilled dado frieze. 

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Dreweatts, Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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