Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856-1941) Portrait Interior wi...

Estimate

€5,000 - €8,000

Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856-1941) Portrait Interior with Oriental Screen (c.1886) Oil on panel, 42 x 28cm (16 ½ x 11”) Provenance: Private Collection, Ireland It says much for John Lavery’s precocity that when he returned to Glasgow at the end of 1884, he sought subject matter in the social life of the city. A door had shut upon the goatherds and washerwomen that he had painted at Grez-sur-Loing as he moved on to the pleasures and pastimes of the urban middle classes who had recognised his talents. Tennis, croquet and yachting were new sources – as indeed were the simpler rituals of coming and going and dressing for an occasion. A visitor arrives, she sits for a moment and is offered a cup of tea. Au Bal, the watercolour, speaks for itself. An attractive young woman, a fan dangling from her wrist, consults her dance card – a face, a form and an action, isolated and observed across a crowded room (figs 1&2 in printed catalogue). Lavery’s work for the next fifty-odd years would abound in such scopophilia. The same contingency is inferred in the present work. There is, however, enough information in the model’s face in the present lot for us to suggest that she could be none other than Bella Cullen, who posed for Lavery’s A Fair Flower, (figs 4&5), a work exhibited at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in February 1887. Cullen was the short-lived consumptive teenage daughter of an Irish miner who lived in Paisley. Although elements of the present work remain unresolved, Lavery’s Portrait interior with oriental screen points to future ambitions. A career would be built on portraits of seated women and men – in many instances essayed in small unfinished oil sketches that indicate no more than simple studio props and the placing of arms and limbs. How someone sits or stands could be as revelatory as facial expression. A few swift notes were often enough to take us to the vivid sense of anticipation that animates the present study. Prof. Kenneth McConkey See illustrations referenced in this note in our online Flip / E-catalogue Fig 1 John Lavery, A Visitor, 1885, 46 x 46 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin Fig 2 John Lavery, Au Bal, 1885, 30 x 30 cm (approx), Private Collection Fig 3 John Lavery, Portrait of a Young Lady, 1886, 77.5 x 64.2 cm, Private Collection BON150316 Fig 4 John Lavery, A Fair Flower, 1887, 38 x 26 cm, Private Collection 010904 Fig 5 John Lavery, Portrait interior with oriental screen, c. 1886, the present picture (detail).