Extraordinary artist who painted everyone from Churchill to IRA leader

“He regarded himself as Irish by birth and Scottish by education,” explains senior curator Professor Frances Fowle, an art historian and Personal Chair of Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Edinburgh.

“He became part of the group known as the Glasgow Boys at its formation and became one of the leading figures within the group, on a level with someone like James Guthrie. But when he moved to London in 1891 he was also closely associated with James McNeill Whistler, who was a huge influence on the Glasgow Boys. So Lavery was a crucial link between them and Whistler. He was also one of the four artists chosen to paint murals for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, and he exhibited there.”

But as well as placing Lavery’s work in the context of the city in which he was raised and where he spent a good part of his working life, the new exhibition follows his peregrinations around some of the more salubrious travel destinations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a member of the so-called Café Society set.

Sir John Lavery, Windy Day (Image: Richard Green Gallery)

“The focus of the show is more on Lavery as a traveller,” says Professor Fowle. “He moved all over the world and lived between Ireland, Scotland and London. He bought a house in Tangier and spent a lot of his winters there from 1891 until just before the First World War.

"Then, after the war, he travelled a lot to the Mediterranean – this was after he had made his name as a portrait painter and could afford to lead a life of leisure. But also in a sense he was following his clients because the people he was mixing with became clients. So the exhibition follows as geographical route, and it’s also situated in the context of the development of travel at that time.”

From Tangier to St Jean de Luz on the French Atlantic coast, from Palm Springs to Miami and New York, from Monte Carlo to the Venice Lido, Lavery often travelled in the company of his wealthy Irish-American wife Hazel, one of London’s pre-eminent society hostesses. “She was a great social asset,” adds Professor Fowle.

“She was really attractive and you get the impression she was quite flirtatious.” British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was a friend and it was in the couple’s London home that the Irish delegation stayed while negotiating the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. By that point, Lavery had been knighted.

Wherever the couple travelled, Helen would be the one holding court while her husband cast his artistic eye over the scene – an outsider who was very much on the inside. Or perhaps the other around.

“Often he’ll paint people taking tea under the pergola, but he’s the person sitting at his easel while they’re all enjoying themselves,” says Professor Fowle. “He’s interested in the people and also the landscape. In Tangier he spent a lot of time painting the view across the Straits of Gibraltar to Spain, or just people walking on the sand.”

Sir John Lavery, On the Cliffs, 1911 (Image: Richard Green Gallery)

Typical of the works in this style included in the exhibition is Florida In Winter. Painted in 1927 it shows a woman in a flowing white dress and bright red hat nonchalantly reading a book with her feet up on a chair while in the background the sun picks out the palm trees. In the middle distance, a game of doubles is underway on a lilac-coloured tennis court. Lawn tennis was then a relatively new sport and Lavery was keen on it as a subject, featuring it in many of his paintings.

Florida In Winter is colourful, the brushstrokes bold, the perspective hazy. It shows the moneyed classes at leisure. But to what extent can Lavery considered an Impressionist, as the exhibition title suggests, at least in terms the average gallery-goer would understand?

“He was aware of French Impressionism but he was far more influenced by the generation of French painters who were perhaps more traditional, such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was a very popular artist painting in the naturalist style,” says Professor Fowle.

“There was also a whole [Impressionist] movement in Britain and he fits into that much more easily. You could define him as a British Impressionist because although he was born in Northern Ireland and died in Ireland, he spent the most crucial years in terms of his training and development in Glasgow initially, then France.”

Lavery liked to portray his own story as a rags-to-riches tale and it certainly wasn’t without its privations. Born in Belfast in 1856, his mother died in childbirth and he was orphaned aged three when his father was lost at sea en route to New York.

Aged 10, he and his elder sister Jane were sent to Saltcoats to live with relatives. In his mid teens Lavery ran away and was living homeless on the streets of Glasgow for a spell. However by his late teens he had enrolled at the city’s Haldane Academy, an art school, and was also working as a photographer’s assistant – in some versions of the story, for the then-Glasgow Herald.

Tragedy struck again in 1876 when Jane committed suicide by jumping into the Clyde from Victoria Bridge, an event which caused Lavery a lifetime of remorse. It’s no surprise, then, that he seized every opportunity which came his way, whether it was luxury travel on ocean liners with his wealthy society wife or the position as war artist which saw him board an airship aged 62 to paint a startling bird’s eye view of a north sea naval convoy.

But as it invites us to enter the world of this most uncommon of artists, it’s leisure and travel not conflict which is the focus of the National’s enticing new exhibition. As Professor Fowle says: “You’re being taken on a journey.” Just enjoy the sights.

An Irish Impressionist: Lavery On Location is at the National (Royal Scottish Academy) until October 27