National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 20th July–27th October

John Lavery (1856–1941), a vibrant painter of the Impressionist era, was born and partly raised in Northern Ireland, grew to adulthood in Ayrshire and Glasgow but remained a proud Irishman.[1] A number of his works can be seen today in Belfast, the city of his birth, including a triptych in the Catholic church of St Patrick and canvases in the Ulster Museum, an important source of loans to this exhibition. Yet Lavery’s career ranged across three continents, even taking in, at the end of his life, the nascent film world of Hollywood. On Location is a fitting title for a retrospective about this artist, who vividly recorded so many aspects of the changing world in which he lived. 

It has been the decades-long achievement of Kenneth McConkey, the exhibition’s principal curator, to reveal the scope and significance of Lavery’s career. A Lavery show on which McConkey worked at the Ulster Museum and the Fine Art Society in 1985 was followed eight years later by a wide-ranging monograph, which demonstrated how the artist’s achievement extended far beyond the society portraits that made him his fortune.[2] This exhibition emphasises the same point with around a hundred paintings of striking diversity, many rarely seen in public. In the spacious rooms of the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, the paintings sing out against luminous walls of green, terracotta and blue, the colour of the central hall, devoted to the theme ‘Sun, sea and sand’. Its memorable images include the supremely elegant woman holding a parasol in L’Eté (Summer; 1903; Musée Rodin, Paris; cat. no.60). 

The current lack of recognition of Lavery in England, France or any of the other locations in which he worked is due to the fact that his realist style did not satisfy a younger generation of modernist artists and critics. Consequently, during the twentieth century, he fell out of mainstream narratives to a greater extent than his exact contemporary John Singer Sargent. It is perhaps a shame that this display did not travel further south to London and Paris. Ultimately, however, the exhibition, and its excellent catalogue, should play an important role in expanding awareness of Lavery’s joyful, perceptive art.[3] 

The display opens with images that Lavery created in Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, among a colony of international artists influenced by the highly successful Salon painter Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–84), whose work appears briefly in an introductory film shown in one of the gallery spaces. Bastien-Lepage championed a rustic naturalism, which informs such works as Lavery’s On the Loing, an afternoon chat (under the cherry tree) (no.7; Fig.10), often described as his ‘thesis painting’. With its bright tones and varied, but orderly brushstrokes, it exemplifies Lavery’s style of this period. Its subject-matter, two laundresses talking to a boatman, is a theme that was made popular not only by contemporary French artists but also by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, whose 1876 essay ‘Forest Notes’ memorably describes the Fontainebleau area. 

Like many pictures of rural scenes at this time, On the Loing represents everyday interactions with a degree of abstraction, giving them an element of mystery. In contrast, the sidelong glance that one of the women in Sewing in the shade (1884; private collection; no.9) gives her interlocutor transforms the painting into situation comedy. In the same room the animated, impressionistic brushstrokes of The bridge at Grez (1901; Ulster Musem; no.13) show how Lavery’s style had developed in the years since the creation of On the Loing or another earlier image of the same bridge (1883; private collection; no.10). Such juxtapositions exemplify the show’s grouping of works in themes rather than strict chronology, an approach that highlights Lavery’s continuous shifts of style. 

The sojourn in France from 1881 to 1884 did not cut Lavery off from artistic life in Britain, particularly in Glasgow, where works such as On the Loing were displayed. Lavery made compelling use of his new French style during the decade that he spent in Scotland’s metropolis, the ‘Second City of the Empire’, from 1885 to 1895. The greens of his forest pictures reappear in new bourgeois subjects, such as games of croquet and tennis, with which he cemented his reputation as a painter of fashionable modern life. With his unerring sense of how to advance, Lavery also made invaluable contacts through his position as official recorder of the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888. 

In contrast to his images of middle-class leisure, the works from Lavery’s numerous trips to Morocco, made over almost three decades from 1891, reuse Orientalist tropes: a frenetic dancer (c.1893; private collection; no.32) or a woman looking out from a rooftop terrace (1907; Birmingham Museums; no.38). Nonetheless, his images of Tangier, the ‘White City’, with their swooping views and luminous tones, are among his most original landscapes. Naturally, he also created memorable images of Western residents at home or, in the case of his own family, in their lush garden (1911; private collection; no.48). 

For such a compelling painter of pleasure, Lavery was remarkably successful as an official war artist. His appointment in 1917 gave him the opportunity to create dramatic images of naval and air-force preparations, although he did not experience the suffering of the front as directly as did Sargent. Yet even before he gained the post, Lavery represented casualties in Wounded, London hospital (1915; Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection; no.65), one of the few paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy show of 1915 that depicted a war-related scene. Most remarkably, in Daylight raid (the studio window), 7th July 1917 (no.71; Fig.11) Lavery allows the viewer to share the experience of his second wife Hazel as she kneels in front of an expansive Kensington window revealing a few cursive marks in the sky: German Gotha aircraft preparing to bomb London. With its combination of terror and sensual sweeps of colour, this is a war picture that deserves to be far better known. 

While Lavery on Location promotes the full range of the artist’s output, it is of course as a portraitist that he was best known in his lifetime. Such works as Hazel in black and gold (1916; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; no.66) exemplify his skill in combining reminiscences of the art of his friend James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) with a nostalgia for Edwardian glamour. Apparently, Hazel gauged the reaction to the painting at its private view in the company of Clementine Churchill and dressed in a highwayman’s cloak. 

Lavery’s portraiture also extended to less alluring themes. He frequently visited Ireland and represented the full range of the country’s political figures, from Edward Carson to Eamon De Valera and, most poignantly, Michael Collins, laid out following his assassination in 1922. Worried about being divisive, Lavery was reassured by Hazel with the words ‘don’t differ, just agree with them all, as you do anyway’, and in fact the couple’s house in London became a neutral territory during the Anglo- Irish treaty negotiations. 

Yet it is notable that these portraits are absent from this exhibition, with the theme of nationalism represented more obliquely through characteristic Irish subjects, ranging from a pilgrimage site (1929; private collection; no.90) to the races. On the face of it Hunter class, Dublin Horse Show (no.86; Fig.12) is a typical image of high life and good connections, taking its viewpoint from the judge’s box facing the water jump. It also evokes, if rather anachronistically, Edgar Degas’s habit of dividing a scene with the uprights of windows. Like much of Lavery’s work, the picture alludes to aspects of Impressionism without embracing all of its stylistic and technical features. 

There is, however, one detail that stands out: while the rest of the image celebrates Dublin’s return to normality after the civil war ended in 1923, at the top of the window a bullet hole seems to refer to the impact of the conflict on the city. As usual, the quality of the execution is exemplary, even as it describes jagged lines of broken glass rather than more familiar motifs. The work typifies the sharp gaze that Lavery could turn on apparently comforting themes, and his ability to report what he found in the world around him rather than necessarily interposing his own sensibility. A wall text quotes a Times critic, who in 1921 wrote that Lavery was ‘a kind of very clever human Kodak’. It suggests how surprising this underrated ‘society’ artist can be. 

[1] The exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (7th October 2023–14th January 2024) and then travelled to the Ulster Museum, Belfast (23rd January–9th June). 

[2] K. McConkey: exh. cat. Sir John Lavery R.A: 1856–1941, Ulster (Ulster Museum) and London (Fine Art Society) 1984; idem: Sir John Lavery, Edinburgh 1993; and idem: John Lavery: A Painter and his World, Edinburgh 2010. 

[3] Catalogue: Lavery: On Location. By Kenneth McConkey with an essay by Brendan Rooney. 224 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, 2023), £35. ISBN 978–1–911716–02–0.