Written by by Joanna Moorhead in THE TABLET, 27 July 2024
John Lavery is one of Ireland’s finest painters – and he played a role in the negotiations over its independence. As an exhibition of his work opens in Edinburgh, Joanna Moorhead considers his life and legacy.
Aged three, John Lavery was an orphan in Belfast; by the time of his death 81 years later in 1941, he was the best-connected artist of his generation; a knight who numbered swathes of the great and good of Britain among his friends (indeed, his daughter had even married into the aristocracy). His social ascendancy was impressive by any standards; but it was especially so given that he was a supporter of Irish independence. He painted Michael Collins twice, once when he was staying at his home in London during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in late 1921, the second time less than a year later, as he lay dead in his coffin.
This summer, Lavery is the blockbuster artist at the Scottish National Academy in Edinburgh. It’s the time of year when the city is packed with crowds for the UK’s largest annual arts festival: and what a treat they have in store, with Lavery’s sunlight-dappled views of France and Spain, Morocco and Florida ranged around its walls. His was an extraordinary talent: he’d been a photographer’s assistant in Glasgow in his youth, and it equipped him marvellously for the stellar career that followed. Photography helped Lavery in two ways: first, he knew how to capture a moment, how to freeze the frame that told a story; and secondly, he would use photography to capture the scene he would later work on in his studio. He was a consummate Impressionist: one of the strongest in a very strong field.
The Edinburgh show is a magnificent survey of his work across many decades, taking him and us from his early years in France to his life in London and thence across the world – his travels, the focus of this exhibition, seem extraordinarily modern rather than late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Lavery loved travelling, and he did so well into old age: at the age of 80 he not only crossed the Atlantic, but went on to cross America, to paint in California as well as in earlier times in Florida.
Lavery left the Ireland of his birth as a boy: having lost both his parents, he was sent to live with relatives in Ayrshire, Scotland. He could have opted for a country life there, but instead he ran away to Glasgow, intending to pursue a career in the fast-growing railway industry. Here occurred the first misfortune that helped make his fortune: because he quickly realised he couldn’t work out how to read a train timetable, necessitating a career switch – and that took him into photography. There, a second difficulty would again have a golden lining: this time the calamity was a fire that devastated his studio – but the insurance money paid for a trip to Paris, where he enrolled in the Académie Julian, alma mater of so many of the Impressionists, and his future was sealed.
Like many of the students at the Julian, Lavery loved the peaceful countryside outside Paris – in his case, he headed towards the artists’ colony in Grez, and many of the works now in Edinburgh recall its gardens, its river, its trees and especially its bridge: The Bridge at Grès (1901) is a masterpiece, with splashes of light as well as water, and his characteristic impasto highlighting the sun’s rays on the boat, where two women are relaxing, one with a hat and the other under a parasol.
But Lavery is better known for his portraits, and in this show two stand out. The first is a striking painting of a young woman dressed in green, with a handsome and rather serious face. This was Lavery’s first wife Kathleen MacDermott: the pair met in 1889, by which time Lavery had moved to London. Kathleen was selling flowers on Regent Street. Many years later, Lavery told his friend George Bernard Shaw about how they got to know one another; soon after that, Shaw wrote his best-known play, Pygmalion, featuring a flower girl who ends up marrying a man “above her station” – later immortalised in My Fair Lady.
The second exceptional portrait here is of Lavery and the daughter he and Kathleen went on to have, Eileen; but Kathleen doesn’t feature in this image because, sadly, she died not long after Eileen’s birth. The painting is titled Père et Fille (1897-1900) and it shows a pensive little girl in a white dress: Eileen, with Lavery looking relaxed and urbane behind her. He looks, and indeed by now was, very much the gentleman; and he was soon to meet and marry his second wife, Hazel Martyn, whom we see in the 1910 portrait Mrs Lavery Sketching. The couple were spending much of their time in Morocco, and Hazel is pictured under a scorching sun; like her husband, she is an artist, and she holds an outsize and rather grand palette in one hand, and a paintbrush in the other. The canvas, though, is empty; which seems rather poignant given that, despite her early promise, she ended up forsaking her own art to invest her time, and impressive social skills, on helping her husband make even more useful connections.
A few years after the couple were married, the First World War broke out; and long before he became an official war artist in 1917, Lavery was painting not just patriotic war scenes, but the reality of war. His most notable work in this show is The First Wounded, London Hospital (1914), an almost photographic image of a ward filled with injured men and anxious wives and mothers. The sun is streaming through the windows, but no amount of light can detract from the human suffering – and this was one of the first important paintings to document that war’s toll.
Another wartime work is Daylight Raid from my Studio Window, 7 July 1917, in which Hazel, dwarfed by their vast Kensington window, half-kneels on a sofa facing a sky filled with what on first sight look like birds. The “birds”, though, are British and German planes engaged in a dogfight over the capital; but there is another illusion here, which is that Hazel is perhaps not gazing out at them, but praying facing a statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue, which resembled the figure in Lavery’s Madonna of the Lakes in St Patrick’s in Belfast, where he was baptised, has been painted over – look closely, and you can make out its shape. Had Lavery perhaps decided he would rather not advertise his Catholicism so blatantly? A few years later, the very studio in which the painting was set would be an informal gathering place for those from both sides during the Treaty negotiations. Being part of the establishment gave the Laverys opportunities to advance their arguments – but they always knew when to speak up, and when to lie low.
When the war was over, the Laverys continued their travels, visiting Italy and Spain, France and the United States, and John never travelled anywhere without his easel and paints. The Edinburgh show gleams with views over sandy beaches and across rolling seas; but however far he travelled, he always returned to Ireland, and on show here is St Patrick’s Purgatory (1929), showing the shoe-less pilgrims making their way to the sanctuary on Lough Derg, watched over by a soutane-wearing priest.
The last painting Lavery created references the Pygmalion story, and is titled Kathleen (The Flower Girl) (c.1938); it’s very different in style from his earlier work, and it shows his granddaughter Ann, who resembled her grandmother Kathleen; she is shown wearing a neat navy frock, carrying a little basket of flowers, to recreate the meeting between her grandparents. By this stage, sadly, Lavery had lost not only Kathleen but also his second wife and daughter: although she was much younger than he was, Hazel died before him, as did Eileen. He spent his final years in Ireland, dying in Kilkenny aged 84, in the midst of another world war.
An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, until 27 October.
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 