The vigorous brushwork and penetrating light of Sir John Lavery’s paintings mark him out as an Irish Impressionist – his perceptive portraits, meanwhile, are on a par with those of his exact contemporary, Sir John Singer Sargent . And yet few art-lovers know of the Belfast-born artist whose career spanned more than 60 years and survived changing tastes in a fast-moving world. The scale of his achievement is reflected in the largest exhibition for three decades devoted to his life and work.
Curated by the National Gallery of Ireland, and first seen in Dublin, then in Belfast, Lavery on Location is now in Edinburgh, for Scotland played an important role in his life. Born in 1856, Lavery was an official war artist in the First World War, was appointed Royal Academician, given the freedom of the cities of both Dublin and Belfast, and was knighted. His later work may have eschewed the radicalism of early 20th-century movements, but his out-and-out painterliness has cried out to be reassessed, which this far-ranging exhibition does magnificently, putting eye-catching pieces into context.
Among the 70-plus works on display, which represent his huge output in portraiture, landscape and society vignettes is An Irish Girl, a painting of huge personal significance for a man with a very high public profile. The strikingly beautiful flower-seller who caught the attention of Lavery as he stepped out of a Covent Garden supplier of artists’ materials revealed herself to be a fellow child of Ireland, one Kathleen McDermott. Her fine face and figure appealed to his artist’s eye, but she had a winning personality too: artist and soon-to-be model were married in no time.
An Irish Girl (1890) was admired for its subtlety and refinement. Lavery was understandably excited by his union with the uneducated but entrancing young woman. He told a journalist friend all about the pleasures of introducing his innocent protegée to his own, more cultivated world of books, art and music.
The journalist was George Bernard Shaw. The seeds of Shaw’s play Pygmalion were sown. But the drama unfolded at pace not only on stage.
After her early death in 1891, only six months after the birth of the couple’s daughter, Eileen, Kathleen was found to have been born Annie Evans, and in Wales. It feels like a long journey back from My Fair Lady , the musical and subsequent film based on Pygmalion , to the man who painted Queen Victoria and other luminaries of his day. But Lavery’s career spanned so many decades, and so many lands, and culminated in his fascination with the dazzling magic of cinema, an art form made of light.
He must have cut an odd figure, surrounded by the advanced technology of the day, when in 1936 he set up his easel on the set of MGM’s Romeo and Juliet , capturing the stars Moira Shearer and Leslie Howard in paint as the cameras rolled. For all his sophistication and international reputation, by the time of his meeting with Kathleen/Annie, Lavery too had had a modest upbringing. When he was three, his father had been among the 400 passengers and crew who perished in 1859 on the fast packet clipper Pomona , bound for the United States and, it was hoped, prosperity.
A few weeks later, his mother died in childbirth. Raised at first by his farming uncle, Edward, little John’s early childhood in the country, with a sister, was idyllic. At the age of 10 or so, he was handed to another relative, this time a well-heeled pawnbroker in Scotland.
His first job was at a photographer’s studio, colouring and retouching, useful practical work for a budding artist, but it was attending the free Haldane Academy in Glasgow, out of work hours, that taught him the basics that stood him in good stead. By the age of 21 he had set himself up as a portrait painter. Then, flush with the insurance pay-out after a studio fire, he studied further in London, and in Paris.
International travel came easily to the young artist who happily immersed himself in the artistic community at Grez-sur-Loing, in the Seine-et-Marne department of northern France. Here he would paint tranquil scenes on and near the riverbank, in which we can only guess at the silent exchanges between the men and women going about their tasks. You long to overhear the confidences that pass between the two young women, in the luminously coloured Sewing in the Shade (1884), one wide-eyed, the other looking down coyly.
In the same year, Lavery returned to Scotland, where in 1888 he set himself up as artist-in-residence at Glasgow’s own Great Exhibition. Rapid sketches capturing extraordinary moments and characters include a glimpse of Queen Victoria on her state visit to the show. He would spend two years painstakingly recapturing the moment when the city worthies gathered at the royal reception.
Lavery would even impress the hard-to-please selectors of art for the French government: in 1900, France bought his self-portrait with daughter Eileen, entitled Père et Fille, its first ever acquisition of a contemporary work from across the Channel. Painted after Lavery settled in London, it shows Eileen dwarfed by her throne-like cane chair, like a little princess. The child was used to adult company, fellow artists, including Whistler, being regular visitors to Lavery’s home and studio in Cromwell Place, South Kensington.
She looks older than her years, although her feet do not touch the ground, and her father, in the background, seems of secondary importance. The effect of an old head on young shoulders was increased when Lavery painted out the rag doll that originally lolled against the chair. Such solemn domestic scenes contrast with his appetite for the great outdoors.
The exhibition recalls in vivid colours the breadth of his travels: he was particularly enamoured of Tangier, with its hot, pink light, visiting for 28 years until 1919, with his second wife Hazel, and buying a house west of the Kasbah. But he was equally at home in languid British gardens. In Pergola (1906) he combines the two – juxtaposing a well-spread table in the shade with the penetrating Moroccan light beyond the foliage.
Lavery’s facility may have cost him posthumously, for the gallery-going public does not always respect most the artist who can turn his hand to any subject, or whose painting style does not fundamentally change, even as experience economises and loosens the brushwork. He can capture, thrillingly, the split second when the player makes contact with the ball in the newly fashionable game of tennis, as in Played! (1885), with its female player in bustle and boater diving for a low backhand, ample skirts spiralling. Then there is the solemn concentration of the First World War nurses at the London Hospital, in a work that was considered the best picture of the year at the Royal Academy exhibition, with its frank acknowledgement of war casualties.
Read Next Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look has just three paintings? Exquisite He can celebrate the gritty reality of ship building in Glasgow, the tension of the jockeys’ dressing room at Ascot or a room full of Van Dycks at Wilton House. He can even recapture, nearly 50 years on, that moment when he saw the Covent Garden ingénue, spotting a similarity between his first love and his granddaughter, Ann. Ann, who resembled her grandmother so strikingly, posed for Lavery in 1938, dressed in the sort of blue gown and red scarf that first caught his eye, and with a basket of flowers, poignant emblem of a first meeting that resonated far beyond the West End of London.
The artist died three years later, at the age of 84, after a period of ill-health and having retreated to Kilkenny, believing London in the Blitz to be “not place for the old”. He left a body of work that is wide-ranging but dominated by comfort and sunlight. These are not always fashionable commodities in 20th-century art, but this sun-soaked world is quite irresistible.
‘An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location’ is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, until 27 October ( nationalgalleries.org ).
